Gville Sun: $1M grant supports UF research using immune system to attack brain tumors

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By Christopher Curry
Staff writer

Published: Sunday, March 27, 2016 at 6:32 p.m.

Two and a half years ago, the University of Florida College of Medicine recruited Dr. Duane Mitchell and his lab team away from Duke University to build up a UF program on brain tumor research.

Since then, Mitchell and his team at the UF Preston A. Wells Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy have made steady progress in the lab and in clinical trials on using the human immune system to attack tumors in children and adults.

They launched the first UF clinical trial to use immunotherapy on children with brain tumors and have attracted an infusion of research dollars to work on developing new treatments.

Last week, Mitchell and his team received another significant funding boost — a $1 million grant from the Hyundai Hope on Wheels Foundation to conduct a four-year research project intended to lead to an improved, more effective immunotherapy treatment for pediatric brain tumors.

“Pediatric brain tumors are a significant problem and are one of the leading causes of death in children related to cancer,” Mitchell said during an interview last week at his office and lab inside the Evelyn F. & William L. McKnight Brain Institute. “For many children diagnosed with malignant brain tumors, standard treatments such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy are not always effective at eradicating the disease. The immune system has at least the potential to identify tumor cells specifically and lead to their targeted elimination from our body.”

The American Cancer Society describes immunotherapy as a “treatment that uses certain parts of a person’s immune system to fight diseases such as cancer.” The treatments may stimulate the immune system “to work harder or smarter to attack cancer cells” or give the “immune system components, such as man-made immune system proteins” to battle cancer, the American Cancer Society wrote.

In the last several years, the field has grown in clinical trials and patient treatment.

“I would definitely say we have seen an explosion, some say a revolution, and I don't think that’s an overstatement, in the last five to seven years,” said Dr. Crystal Mackall, associate director of the Stanford University Cancer Institute and an expert in immunotherapy.

She said a potential advantage of the treatment lies in the fact that when the immune system successfully fights off an infection, the body often builds up a long-time protection against that infection. If that carries over to cancer treatments, immunotherapy could provide additional protection against recurrence than other forms of treatment, Mackall said.

She said right now immunotherapy is best known for treating melanoma, the most aggressive form of skin cancer, but there has also been successes with lung cancer, leukemia, lymphoma and breast cancer.

“We are all waiting on a breakthrough for brain tumors and that has yet to happen,” MacKall said.

Mitchell and his team of researchers at UF are one group striving for that breakthrough. Their work will focus on one of the most common malignant brain tumors in children, medulloblastoma.

Mitchell said the researchers will take immune cells from a patient and stimulate them in an effort to have them “recognize” the patient's cancer cells as foreign and attack them. Because cancer cells are partially normal cells, they are often able to “hide out” from the immune system, Mitchell said. He said that’s a challenge to immunotherapy that researchers are trying to overcome.

The UF research will also work to identify good “targets” in brain tumors for the immune system to attack. That will include comparing the proteins in brain tumors to those present in normal brain tissue and studying the changes or mutations in those brain tumor proteins.

Mitchell said the research will “allow us to bring our next generation of immunotherapy” into clinical trials on treatment of childhood brain tumors.

Mitchell was one of four researchers in the country to win a Hyundai Hope on Wheels Quantum research grant.

In a press release, Hyundai Hope on Wheels officials said that, “while childhood cancer survival rates have jumped from 10 percent 50 years ago to 90 percent today, the final stretch to ending the disease will be the most difficult, evidenced by slow progress in the last 10 years. The four Quantum recipients have been identified as having the highest potential of breaking through and bringing us closer to a world without pediatric cancer.”

Mitchell and the other researchers accepted their grants last Thursday evening during a ceremony in New York City.