That’s horrible. It’s a reminder that DCVax L might offer hope to some patients, but it won’t work for everyone. Patients need an operable lesion and significant lysate to create the vaccine. Not every GBM patient will have those conditions.
I’m of the opinion that there are certain heterogeneous stem cell antigens that need to be presented in full to the immune system for this vaccine to work. If you get all the antigens in the whole tumor lysate, the vaccine works. If not, it doesn’t. I’m hoping this study helps to identify biological markers that indicate whether the vaccine is working. There is so much potential information to be gleaned from this work. There’s probably a reason the vaccine may be working for a significant percentage of patients. The science is figuring this out and extending it to other patients. That’s the biggest hope of all here, because, historically, almost nothing works for GBM.