glioblastoma

This is Daniel Zamler, postdoctoral fellow at UCSF, interviewing Amy Heimberger, vice chair for research of the Department of Neurological Surgery and scientific director of the Lou and Jean Malnati Brain Tumor Research Institute at Northwestern University for the Snow Hot Topics podcast.

Today, we will be discussing current barriers of myeloid cell therapy in GBM.

Thank you so much for joining me today, Professor Heimberger.

Delighted to be here.

Thank you.

Let's jump right in.

So myeloid cells have gone from being viewed primarily as immunosuppressive bystanders to promising therapeutic targets in GBM.

What has changed in our understanding over the past decade? And why is there so much excitement around myeloid directed therapies now?

And we are excited to share some data of that compound in January of next year.

Yeah, I want to get back to that in a second because you're thinking about like GBM, for example, which that would be important.

Speaking of that science, like up to this point, as you and others have developed this, it's specifically for those MTAP deletion patients.

But you've started to think about actually treating wild type patients as well, right? Yes.

That's an area of active research here at Tango at the moment, and we will probably speak more about this strategy at the beginning of next year.

All right.

So other cancers, sounds like you're focused on lung and GBM.

What can you tell us about both of those in terms of where you are and when we might see some data? Yeah.

Is there anything from the morning sessions you've enjoyed? Just listen

to all the talks and GBM talks, don't read any GBM stuff.

Yeah, I

think the GBM stuff's interesting because I've not seen much research in it for a long time.

It's nice to be able to see it on screen about how cool it is.

We were talking about, you know, survivorship's not great for GBMs, but actually something like this is really powerful that could work.

I

thought it was pretty cool.

Not always, because some people fall.

They say, oh, that would happen to our first GBM patient.

She was under complete control with metabolic therapy, and we did the scans on her brain.

complete gone.

So I'm gonna tell you, and this will probably be one of the more controversial things I'll say to you, because I do have a blog coming about this.

Relatively soon, I just wrote a blog about GBM, which is the most deadly cancer that humans get.

This change in the vortex, in terms of its geometry, I think defines what a grade one tumor is, grade two tumor, grade three, and grade four.

Right now, in centralized medicine, we rely on the pathologist to tell us what the grade is.

In May this year, Trogenics' first patient was dosed with its gene therapy for glioblastoma.

That patient was dosed in Edinburgh ahead of the American site, which is in Ohio.

Glioblastoma, as many of our listeners will know, is the cancer that has defeated almost everything our industry has threaded it.

And

Steve has spent the last two decades thinking about why.

That's quite a depressing view, but in a way it's the view you need if you're trying to find a single drug for a mutation.

What we've done then is become too distracted with that, I think, and lose sight of the fact that all gliomas look like gliomas.

Glioblastoma looks pretty much the same to the histologist.