A new nontoxic vaccine for treating brain cancer-a disease afflicting 10,000 to 20,000 new patients a year in the United States-can improve the quality of life for those whose previous treatment options could be harmful.
Dr. John Sampson, associate deputy director of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke, recently received the Tug McGraw Foundation's Researcher of the Year Award for his contributions to this vaccine for brain tumors.
The award is given to individuals who have made advancements in the field of brain tumor research and taken the study to adapt to something useful, said Jennifer Brusstar, CEO and president of the Tug McGraw Foundation.
Sampson, who is also an associate professor of neurosurgery at Duke University Medical Center, is the second doctor from the University to receive the award. Dr. Darell Bigner, executive director of the Tisch Brain Tumor Center received the award in 2006.
Research involving the vaccine started several years ago when Bigner identified a mutation in the epidermal growth factor receptor variant III--a commonly active receptor within cancer, Sampson said. The mutation caused a large segment of the gene to be deleted and brought two generally separate parts of a molecule together to create an original protein sequence, he added.
He said that the original protein marker would eliminate a common immunotherapy problem where the drugs would attack receptors on the tumor cells but also on normal cells throughout the body, creating an overall negative and toxic effect on the patient.
"It's totally tumor-specific," Sampson said. "So the immune response produced will only be against tumor cells because this mutation is present nowhere else on the adult human body."
Even if the vaccine has shown good progress in killing all tumor cells with the protein sequence, it will not eradicate the whole tumor because the sequence is not expressed on every tumor cell, he said.
Sampson added that although mutations in cancer vary greatly from patient to patient, this specific protein sequence has been very common in many patients, and another goal would be to find another protein sequence that is repeated often in all tumors.
The vaccine is now entering a Phase III trial where it is being tested on 400 to 500 patients with randomized placebos.
"If that trial is positive, it will become the standard of care with this disease," Sampson said. "And that will be a real breakthrough because it will be the first tumor-specific approach in this disease, and it's a very nontoxic therapy."
He added that the hope for the vaccine is to eventually replace the harmful chemotherapy and radiation cancer patients go through, but that for the time being a combination treatment of both chemotherapy and the vaccine also seems beneficial.
"We know that EGFRvIII actually in some way makes tumor cells resistant to chemotherapy," Sampson said. "If you have this marker in your tumor, the standard chemo we give to patients doesn't work. And so, using this vaccine, we think, is eliminating cells that are not sensitive to the chemo and allowing the chemo to kill the other cells."
The Tug McGraw Foundation commended the vaccine's nontoxicity and ability to preserve the quality of life of the brain tumor patient, Sampson added.
"You could ask 500 different institutions what its quality-of-life-for-brain-tumors definition is and you're going to get 500 answers," Brusstar said. "And I think that we as an organization and foundation have a responsibility to deem quality of life."
The Tug McGraw Foundation will hold the first-ever Quality of Life Summit in February aiming to set a criteria and eliminate the obscurity surrounding the meaning of quality of life for brain cancer patients, Brusstar added.
"I think that having the Tug McGraw Foundation and having their focus be on quality of life keeps the researchers aware of the fact that there's a patient involved and that patients can't be poked, prodded and abused," Sampson said. "They actually have to have some quality of life because it is a devastating disease and we're not curing everybody."
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