title: Tumour vaccine approaches for CNS malignancies: progress to date.
abstract: Despite the many overall advances in understanding cancer biology and therapeutic development in the last 50 years, most CNS malignancies are still clinically difficult, incurable diseases. Current combinations of aggressive surgical resection, radiation therapy and chemotherapy regimens do not significantly improve long-term patient survival for these cancers. Cancer immunotherapy is a potentially promising new therapeutic strategy that primes a patient's immune system to attack neoplastic cells. We review the preclinical and clinical progress in developing vaccination-based therapy for CNS malignancies to date, including peptide-based vaccinations, dendritic cell-based vaccinations and other potential modalities. Some of the challenges for developing an effective vaccination strategy, such as abnormal immune molecules on glioma cells and abnormal lymphocyte populations within a glioma, are also discussed.
authors.affiliation: Brain Tumor Research Laboratory, Department of Neurological Surgery, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53792, USA.
authors.forename: Johnathan D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Ebben
authors.forename: Brandon G
authors.initials: BG
authors.lastname: Rocque
authors.forename: John S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Kuo
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001932:Brain Neoplasms / Q000276:immunology / Q000628:therapy; D019496:Cancer Vaccines / Q000276:immunology / Q000627:therapeutic use*; D016543:Central Nervous System Neoplasms / Q000276:immunology / Q000628:therapy*; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D003713:Dendritic Cells / Q000276:immunology; D006360:Heat-Shock Proteins / Q000276:immunology; D006801:Humans; D007167:Immunotherapy / Q000379:methods; D022223:Vaccines, Subunit / Q000276:immunology
chemical_list: D019496:Cancer Vaccines; D006360:Heat-Shock Proteins; D022223:Vaccines, Subunit