Glioblastoma is a terminal disease whose average life expectancy is less than two years. The current treatments are based on more than 30 years old, as no significant advances have been made to combat this type of tumor efficiently.
The results of this study offer a new therapeutic option against glioblastoma: the use of the drug ADI-PEG20, which eliminates systemic arginine, in combination with the application of focal brain radiotherapy.
With this, it was possible to observe how a brain tumor, incurable to date, was eliminated in vivo models that died of natural causes without showing any manifestation of the disease.
“With this new treatment, we were able to cure animals of an aggressive and terminal disease”, says Dr. Sarmiento, “the post-mortem analyses detected how the cerebral immune response, and fundamentally the microglia cells, were activated during the treatment, directing their attack against the tumor cells and thus facilitating the tumor’s complete elimination”.
The data obtained are a ray of hope for the treatment of patients with this type of tumor, since, regardless of the success of the new anticancer drugs, their efficacy in the central nervous system is currently minimal, largely due to their difficulty in reaching the cancer cells located inside the brain.
Another clinical trial (NCT04587830) also focused on another specific type of glioblastoma patient, studying the use of the same drug and whose results are proving to be very promising. The drug did not manifest side effects in the patients involved in said trial.
Source: Medindia
