Each year, about 170,000 people will have a tumor in the brain that has spread from another part of the body, and about 15,000 Americans are diagnosed with a primary brain tumor.
The deadliest type, a grade-four glioma, has a life expectancy of less than a year. According to the National Brain Tumor Foundation, some of the most common symptoms of a brain tumor are headaches, seizures in a person who does not have a history of seizures, cognitive or personality changes, eye weakness, nausea or vomiting, speech disturbances, or memory loss.
Surgery is the chief form of treatment for brain tumors that lie within the membranes covering the brain or in parts of the brain that can be removed without damaging critical neurological functions. Because a tumor will recur if any tumor cells are left behind, the surgeon's goal is to remove the entire tumor whenever possible. Radiation therapy and chemotherapy, in general, are used as secondary treatment for tumors that cannot be cured by surgery alone.
Dr. Keith Black, of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, has been studying brain tumors for about 18 years. Black said brain tumors try to hide proteins on the tumor cell surface that the immune system could use to recognize the tumor. By hiding these cells, brain tumors become difficult to eradicate.
The first step of Black's research strips these "hidden" proteins from tumor cells, and then cultures them from a piece of a patient's tumor that's removed with surgery.
Next come special immune cells called dendritic cells. Dendritic cells make up a very small percentage of the white blood cells, but they are the most efficient cells for presenting foreign proteins to the immune system.
"We essentially have developed a technique to put these proteins [that the tumor tries to 'hide'] directly on these [dendritic cells] and allow these cells to present these back to the proteins to the immune system by giving these cells back under the skin just as a shot, like a vaccine," Black said.
The killer immune cells then recognize them and divide into millions of powerful T-cells.
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Brain tumor vaccine
The vaccine is created with the patient's very own tumor cells.
 
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"Now, when they see the tumor with this protein on the surface, they will try to attack it and kill the tumor cell," Black said.
Black's newest endeavor is to inject the vaccine directly into the tumor of patients whose cancer has recurred. In the first patient vaccinated this way, the tumor appears to be at least stabilizing.
"Certainly, it's a much more efficient way of using the vaccine.
Ultimately, we hope that we will be able to eliminate the need for surgery altogether by combining this strategy with non-invasive strategies of destroying the tumor … and just putting these cells right into the tumor to allow the tumor to be eradicated," Black said.
