Dr. Poul Sorensen and his team at BC Cancer and the University of British Columbia recently received the Brain Tumour Charity Expanding Theories award to support with exploring new ways to treat medulloblastoma.
Medulloblastoma is a fast-growing and the most common childhood brain tumour. Treatment typically involves surgery to remove as much of the tumour as possible, followed by radiotherapy and chemotherapy. However, these methods do not always work and can cause serious side effects that affect the developing brain of a child.
An approach showing promise is immunotherapy, which harnesses the body's own immune system to fight cancer cells. So far, it has had limited success in the brain tumour field.
The team has identified two new markers expressed on the surface of medulloblastoma cells. Now, with support from the Expanding Theories award, they will study how best to target them using immunotherapy.
Their aim is to find out how best to reach these targets using immunotherapy. This technique uses antibodies – molecules produced by the body to recognize and destroy harmful substances. By identifying and characterizing the antibodies that can recognize these targets, the team can develop a guided treatment that can piggy-back these antibodies to kill the tumour cells. Dr. Sorensen hopes to test the effectiveness of these targeted cancer treatments at killing medulloblastoma cells in pre-clinical models. Long term, they hope to gather enough strong data to support bringing this idea towards clinical trials.
“By identifying targets specific to medulloblastoma cells and developing novel targeting strategies, our hope is to dramatically improve the outcomes of medulloblastoma patients and to reduce adverse effects on growing children,” said Dr. Sorensen.
To help accelerate their research, the team plans to edit the genes of medulloblastoma cell lines. By monitoring biophysical characteristics, like tracking if the cells survive and multiply because of the genetic changes, they can begin to test the functional significance of these targets. As well, they are also using a large library of sequences to determine which antibody proteins bind to the specific target proteins the best, as a first step in generating antibody therapeutics for the study.
Congratulations to Dr. Sorensen and his team for receiving this award!