Hot Topics: Harnessing Dendritic Cell Recruitment and the Organization of GBM

So your laboratory has spent more than two decades studying the biology of gliomas before reaching this first in-human trial.

Looking back, what were the pivotal discoveries that convinced you this approach was ready for patients?

Right.

So that's, uh, it's almost a kind of difficult question 'cause the question tries to identify what made us move from the basic science that we were always doing-

Yeah

... working on to deciding that it was time to do the translation into the clinic.

That's a really difficult step.

The reason it's a difficult step is that you're doing all the experiments in experimental animals, and no matter what model you use, it's very difficult to extrapolate on whether the strategy would work in human patients.

Of course, and there's toxicities that you can't accurately model in mice and so on and so forth, right?

Sure.

And how you measure the efficacy, how you translate efficacy data from experimental models to human patients.

So in our case, what convinced us was that we had really large size effects of our therapy.

Uh-huh.

We used models which were difficult to treat, and we had very good responses, i.e., long survivals.

Yeah.

And our therapy induced immunological memory.

Right.

That's-

And because what we wanted to achieve eventually is to train the immune cells to come and find the tumor cells in the brain and eliminate them, and for that, immunological memory was, was crucial.

So we had a strategy that had not been used before.

We had good size effects.

Uh-huh.

And eventually it came the time when our colleagues were saying, "Well, you know, if you want to do gene therapy, you really have to do it in humans." Uh-

So-

So we, so we bit the bullet and started to work and do all the background work that's necessary to move something from the bench into a clinical trial.