Peptide Vaccine Based Immunotherapy for Pediatric Low-Grade Glioma

During the last decade, researchers have gained significant preclinical and clinical experience with immunotherapy for adult gliomas, and propose to extend these insights to the treatment of childhood gliomas, based on the research team’s observation of substantial similarities between these tumors in their expression of glioma-associated antigens (GAAs). Principal investigator Dr. Ian Pollack and colleagues at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh propose the use of a GAA-based vaccine cocktail, combined with an immunoadjuvant (poly-ICLC), for children with progressive low-grade gliomas. They hypothesize that vaccine-based immunotherapy will not only prove safe for the treatment of pediatric gliomas, but will also demonstrate activity as assessed by clinical, radiologic, and immunologic parameters. Their clinical study and biological correlative analyses will represent the first application of a multipeptide epitope vaccine-based strategy to a pediatric glioma cohort, providing fundamental data for assessing safety, and clinical and immunological efficacy, of immunotherapeutic strategies in the pediatric tumor context.

Funded in 2008.