Tetanus Shot May Boost Brain Cancer Survival
One patient with glioblastoma still alive nine years later
"We think the tetanus shot does a very good job of awakening the immune system and sort of puts the lymph nodes and entire immune system on alert," Batich explained. "It gives our dendritic cell vaccine a better opportunity to reach where it needs to go."
Even in the non-tetanus shot group, survival times were somewhat longer than average for glioblastoma patients. Half of those patients lived about 18.5 months from diagnosis, the researchers said.
Three of the six patients randomly selected to receive a tetanus shot plus dendritic cell therapy were alive at the time of researchers' survival analysis. One lived 4.8 years, while another lived 5.9 years, and the remaining patient continues to have no tumor growth 8.8 years after treatment.
"This is a group of patients that desperately need a new approach, and this is a clever and exciting approach," said Dr. David Baskin, director of the Peak Brain and Pituitary Tumor Center at Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas, who wasn't involved in the new study but has participated extensively in other brain tumor research.
"All of us in the field are eager to move away from standard chemotherapy ... and trying to attack some basic thing that cancer cells just can't do without, an Achilles' heel in the cancer," added Baskin, also vice chairman of the hospital's department of neurosurgery.
"So the idea of using the immune system to treat cancer conceptually makes sense," he said.
Batich said that no adverse side effects were observed in any study participants receiving the dendritic cell vaccine, tetanus shot, or both. She and her colleagues plan further analysis of the treatments in larger clinical trials.
"We can leverage a lot of safety with this type of vaccine as opposed to the typical standard of care for cancer patients, which is a program to kill all malignant cells but may do so at a cost of destroying healthy cells as well," she said. "This offers an advantage."