Although major progress has been made in the standard treatment for glioblastomas, encompassing the maximal surgical resection, chemotherapy and radiation therapy, it is possible to increase survival rates significantly only in a few patients. Therefore, it is necessary to explore new therapeutic modalities, one of which is immunotherapy. The aim of the study was to evaluate the efficacy of the combined use of autologous and pooled tumor lysates in comprehensive treatment of patients with glioblastoma.
Materials and methods: All patients (n=58, including 30 males and 28 females aged 18-70 years) were randomized into three groups, two of which received immunotherapy based on injection of autologous dendritic cells pulsed with autologous tumor lysates (first protocol) or pooled lysates (second protocol) from more than one tumor, in addition to the planned standard treatment. The patients of group 3 (control) received the standard comprehensive treatment encompassing the maximum safe tumor resection followed by radiation therapy and chemotherapy.
Results: The tolerability of both applied immunotherapy protocols was good: there were no anaphylactic reactions observed or patients who prematurely discontinued participation in the study. The final analysis of the data revealed no significant differences in median survival values of patients in each of the three groups. However, when analyzing the Karnofsky Performance Status in patients of group 2, it was found that it tended to improve.
Conclusion: The study shows that the proposed immunotherapy protocols are safe for clinical use and have the potential to improve the patient's life quality. However, these findings should be considered intermediate until the findings of multicenter randomized clinical trials with a larger number of patients are obtained.
Keywords: autologous tumor lysate; dendritic cells; glioblastoma; immunotherapy; overall survival of glioblastoma patients; pooled tumor lysate.