Immunotherapy for Brain Tumours
What is immunotherapy for brain tumours?
Immunotherapy stimulates the body’s natural immune system to destroy cancer cells.
It is thought that the key component of the immune system for defeating brain tumours are a type of immune cell called T cells.
These cells protect the body from infections (and cancer) by specifically recognising anything ‘non-self’, such as viruses and bacteria, and killing infected cells. T cells can also recognise and eliminate tumour cells, because these cells make many mutated proteins, which are seen by T cells as ‘alien’.
Activation of an anti-tumour T cell response is a key goal of immunotherapy. This approach is potentially capable of completely eradicating tumours, and preventing relapse.
Is immunotherapy treatment for brain tumours available on the NHS?
There are no immunotherapy treatments approved for treating brain tumours within the NHS, because there is currently no method has been proven to have lasting success with a meaningful number of patients. However, approaches are still being tested in clinical trials and there is strong indication that scientific research can potentially find a role for immunotherapy in the treatment of brain tumours.
Read more Show lessWhat kinds of immunotherapy are being researched for brain tumours?
Vaccines
Cancer cells are capable of ‘fooling’ the immune system so that they can grow and spread undetected by the body’s natural defence system. This process is called immunosuppression and is a challenge that must be overcome for effective immunotherapy. Brain tumour vaccines work by encouraging the immune system to recognise tumour specific proteins (known as antigens), and destroy the tumour cell.
Read more Show lessImmune checkpoint inhibitors
Although they are not strictly speaking a form of immunotherapy because they don’t stimulate the body’s natural immune system to destroy cancer cells, immune checkpoint inhibitors do enable the immune system to work more effectively against cancer and are therefore sometimes included in this category of treatments.
Read more Show lessMonoclonal antibodies (MABs) for brain tumours
Monoclonal antibodies (MABs) are drugs that can specifically target tumour cells, and allow recognition and destruction of that cell by the immune system. However because they don’t directly stimulate an increased immune response, they are not always classed as a form of immunotherapy.
Read more Show lessCombination therapies for brain tumours
Recent research has shown that most immunotherapies work better in combination. For example, a vaccine helps to alert the immune system to specific tumour antigens, but this may not be sufficient to destroy the tumour unless partnered with another approach such as immune checkpoint blockade that overcomes tumour immunosuppression and unleashes the full power of the immune system against the tumour.
Read more Show less