Military metaphors are hard to avoid when describing the work in Daniela Bota's lab.
Petri dishes become training camps, where cells taken from patients "learn" to attack a patient's brain tumor.
Dr. Daniela Bota is conducting human trials of possible brain-cancer vaccines, an example of a trend known as personalized medicine. She is pictured with images of brain tumors.
MINDY SCHAUER, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
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Then, they are re-injected into the patient to seek out and destroy the enemy.
Bota, a UC Irvine neuro-oncologist, is conducting three separate human trials of brain tumor vaccines, with a fourth on the horizon.
And all four are potentially significant advances in the rapidly expanding realm of "personalized medicine" ? drafting a patient's own cells in the fight against disease.
"It's the wave of the future," Bota told a recent visitor to her lab, where the brains of laboratory mice bred to grow human tumors are revealing the tumors' secrets ? and their vulnerabilities.
The clinical trial of the training-camp treatment, known as DCVax, is aimed at patients whose brain tumors have been surgically removed.
Parts of the patient's tumor cells mingle in the petri dish with immune cells, known as dendritic cells, strained from the patient's blood.
"We teach the dendritic cells to fight the tumor," Bota said. "They go and interact with the other immune cells. Everybody gets the message."
While follow-up radiation and chemotherapy can extend patients' lives, it typically fails to remove all cancer cells. Beefing up the patient's immune cells just might.
Two other trials target proteins found on the surface of cancer cells. Like a rallying flag, they summon souped-up immune cells to tear the tumor apart.
"Chemotherapy attacks normal cells," Bota said, leading to unwanted side effects, such as memory loss.
Her approach takes sharper aim at tumor cells.
"A majority of patients have almost no side effects," she said. "There's a much better tolerance than (with) traditional therapies."
A fourth trial awaiting approval by the Food and Drug Administration would deploy an even broader arsenal against tumors.
Tumor cells from one patient along with those of three others will be used to arm immune cells with the power to recognize and attack a variety of tumor types ? defeating cancer's ability to mutate rapidly and camouflage itself from the immune system.
Earlier this year, Bota received special permission from the FDA to try out the treatment on a terminally ill patient.
"The median survival was probably two months or less," she said, for patients in his condition.
He was treated in March. And the patient is still alive as 2012 draws to a close, despite the cancer that threatened to end his life when the year was just getting started.
"He's largely out-survived his expected survival," she said.
Bota and her fellow researchers are careful to avoid leaping to conclusions based on results from a single patient.
Still, the man's survival is encouraging, and could bode well for the larger trial to come.
UC Irvine's Comprehensive Brain Tumor Program has been growing steadily in recent years, she says, first with Dr. Mark Linskey and later Bota's research partner, neuro-oncologist Jose Carrillo.
More recently, neurosurgeons Johnny Delashaw and Frank Hsu joined the team.
"We're actually becoming one of the biggest vaccine programs in the whole country for brain tumors," Bota said. "We have three very strong brain-tumor neurosurgeons, definitely moving us forward at the speed of light."
She is seeking brain cancer patients for all three trials now under way, and the studies should remain open for the next one to three years.
"If any of those studies give positive results, we'll hopefully have one more gun in the arsenal to be fighting the tumor," she said.
Bota said she hopes to obtain permission to begin the fourth trial by spring. It would become the first trial of the vaccine, known as ERC 1671, in the United States, although it is already available in Europe.
Contact the writer: 714-796-7865 or pbrennan@ocregister.com.
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Source: http://www.ocregister.com/news/cells-378943-tumor-patient.html
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