ASCO24 Updates: How Glioblastoma Responds to Dendritic Cell Vaccination?

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting is one of the largest and most prestigious conferences in the field of oncology. This year, the meeting took place from May 31 to June 4 in Chicago, Illinois. The event gathers oncologists, researchers, and healthcare professionals from around the world to discuss the latest advancements in cancer research, treatment, and patient care. Keynote sessions, research presentations, and panel discussions are typically part of the agenda, providing attendees with valuable insights into emerging trends and innovations in oncology.

This year, OncoDaily was at ASCO 2024 for the first time covering the meeting on-site. We had the pleasure of interviewing researchers who summarized the highlights of their work.

In this video Guilherme Lepski, MD, PhD Professor of Neurosurgery at University of São Paulo Faculty of Medicine Clinics Hospital shared their abstract on ‘Immunological profiling of glioblastoma cellular composition to predict response to dendritic cell vaccination.‘

My name is Guilherme Lepski, professor at the University of São Paulo, Cleansing Hospital and oncologist neurosurgeon. Our study is about glioblastoma. So we focused our interest in this kind of tumor because it’s relatively common.

It responds for 2% of the cancers in the adult population, but 3% of the annual deaths. And despite of all available treatment, maximal surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the survival is quite restricted. So there is a lot of interest in the development of new strategies to fix this tumor.

So our main idea was to develop a vaccination based on allogeneic dendritic cells. We reported these results in a publication last year of a phase 2 trial with 40 patients. It was a successful study.

And now in the study being reported here at ASCO this year, we asked ourselves which kind of characteristics have the patients who responded well to this therapy. And based on this, we developed an algorithm based in machine learning. It’s called neural network, which was able to predict survival in terms of the immune cells that infiltrated the tumor bulk.

So we were able to predict survival at a rate of over 70% accuracy. And we think this is a very nice improvement and will help us to further foster strategies based in dendritic cell vaccination for this tumor.

More videos and content from ASCO 2024 on OncoDaily.