Dr. Mahua Dey, a UW Health | Carbone Cancer Center neurosurgeon and associate professor of neurological surgery at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, often operates on glioblastomas. Knowing how aggressive and deadly this form of brain cancer is, she is researching a new personalized vaccine that would revitalize the patient’s immune system to fight new cancer growth.
“As a surgeon scientist, my approach to research is translational — a true combination of my clinical practice and basic science research,” said Dey.
“Every tumor I operate on, we take it to the lab with three specific goals. One: to really understand the tumor biology. Two: to understand the immunogenomics of the tumor. And three: to leverage what we learned from one and two as a treatment opportunity.”
According to Dey, glioblastomas are one of the most common, yet most aggressive, forms of brain cancer. Unfortunately, treatment options are limited and patients usually die within a few years of diagnosis. Brain cancers are more difficult to access and less prevalent than other cancers, leading to less research and fewer therapeutic developments.
Dey is hoping to fill this gap. She is developing a vaccine that trains the immune system to fight new growth of glioblastoma. This treatment would be given after tumor removal surgery with the goal of stopping the cancer from returning. This is particularly important for glioblastoma, which has a nearly 100% recurrence rate because it is impossible to completely remove all the microscopic disease with surgery.
“One of the biggest issues with brain cancer is that no matter what we do, it always comes back,” Dey said. “We can't stop you from getting a brain tumor at this time, but once you have one, we can train your immune cells to kill it before it's ready to become a tumor again.”
Her lab creates the vaccine using a patient’s own tumor cells, which are genetically modified to create an immune memory boosting signal that helps the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells.
In preclinical testing with mice, the treatment boasted a 100% tumor response rate. The treatment has also created a long-lasting immune memory in the mice, meaning that the immune cells will kill the cancer every time it is reintroduced. Dey is submitting an investigational new drug application to the FDA to hopefully soon begin clinical testing.
Apart from glioblastomas, Dey is hopeful that her research can be spun off to create treatments for other solid tumor cancers.
“This is the ultimate personalized treatment because for each person, it's a personalized vaccine that's targeted to your tumor and your immune system,” Dey said. “It’s exciting.”