Glioblastoma is the most aggressive type of primary tumor in the central nervous system (CNS tumors). It is hard to treat and has a poor prognosis for survival. Primary CSN tumors occur in approximately 1400 adults in Sweden every year and is the third most common cause of cancer-related deaths in individuals between 15-24 years of age. There is no prophylaxis for primary CNS tumors. The causes of most CNS-tumors are unknown, but there are several risk factors that have been identified. Both heredity and environmental factors are likely to come into play, but clinical data does not suggest any convincing evidence of CNS tumor formation. Some cases of CNS tumors are related to known genetic conditions that cause rare syndromes and have an increased risk of getting a brain tumor. The treatments for glioblastoma are surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, TTField treatment and immunotherapy. Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that uses the patient’s immune system to fight CNS tumors. New cancer immunotherapies, such as dendritic cell (DC)-based vaccines are under development to enhance anti-tumor presentation and to prime anti-tumor T-cell responses. The objective of this study was to investigate the efficacy of DC vaccines for the treatment of glioblastoma. Seven clinical studies from PubMed were found after searching in the Pubmed database, and filtering through the inclusion and exclusion criteria. All seven studies explored the efficacy of DC vaccines on overall survival and progression-free survival for patients with glioblastoma. In addition to investigating the safety and adverse events, the clinical trials evaluated the immune response to the DC vaccines against glioblastoma. Combining standard of care (SOC) with DC vaccines prolonged the overall survival by several months compared to SOC alone. Severe adverse reactions (grade 3) were reported in two studies, while the rest of the studies showed that patients tolerated the DC vaccines and had only mild grade 1-2 adverse events. Half of the studies correlated prolonged median survival or progressions- free survival with immune response. Further research is required to compare the efficacy of DC vaccines and other immunotherapies in order to conclude whether DC vaccines are a feasible effective treatment of glioblastoma in the future.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-128910 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Persson, Maja |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för kemi och biomedicin (KOB) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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