VIDEO: Immunotherapies, clinical trials expand brain tumor treatment options

Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

So, what I'm looking forward to is really, first, right, we are smarter on how we are designing clinical trial and the fact that, when we start clinical trial more and more, we don't only want to develop a new therapy, but also support the patient and the caregivers. We can have the best treatment possible, but at the same time, we need to take care of the patient and the brain healing process in supporting the family. Because it is your brain, it is your functioning, it is what makes you you, it is quite emotional when, let's say your tumor is in a part of the brain that triggers a weakness, a paralysis, or speech difficulty, right? It's really upsetting. So, what I'm the most excited about is I think we're getting smarter in making sure that when we design trial, we design trial that are great new therapies, but are also looking at the quality of life of our patient what we call the supportive care. How can we also help the caregiver of our patients?

The other thing also that I'm the most excited about is, I think that we have learned, right, so in oncology, one thing that has been the last 10 years has been really immunotherapy in oncology. And unfortunately in brain tumor, the different immunotherapies, the PD-1, PD-L1 inhibitor, really they have not shown benefit in primary brain tumor patient. But I think that we are, though, figuring out what are the immunotherapies that can help our patient. So, we have more and more data on different vaccine, dendritic cell vaccine, peptide vaccine, there is some very encouraging data also on CAR-T therapy. CAR-T therapy, unfortunately they don't persist a long period of time, but there is very smart researcher and multiple institutions trying to figure out how do we prolong the efficacy of the CAR-T therapy, and so that's something we need to look at.

There is also tons of different oncolytic viruses that we inject directly, or viruses, not all oncolytic, but that we inject directly into brain tumor. We can do that safely. We have good immune response. We have patient that will live for a prolonged period of time, and we know we can do that safely. So, I think that what I'm the most excited about is we are less and less scared of the brain. We have ways to work around the whole issue of the blood-brain barrier by injecting a lot of our drug directly into the tumor safely. And so, I would say for anyone watching and taking care of brain tumor patient, don't be afraid of looking what are the clinical trials available? What is possible for my patient? Because we do have more and more treatment available that are well tolerated for a patient, in addition to just the standard radiation, Temodar and Optune device. There is more and more available. So thinking about it, referring patient to clinical research, we are smarter, safer immunotherapy. So many people are working on it.