13 Nov Leading new treatment research for neuroblastoma
DeSantes, a UW Carbone Cancer Center researcher and Medical Director for the Pediatric Bone Marrow Transplant and Cell Therapy program, said this phase I-II clinical trial uses a variation of an existing immunotherapy drug as part of a combination therapy for neuroblastoma patients who have advanced stage disease and have failed other treatments.
“This is a very high-risk patient population — usually they’ve failed a number of different therapies before they would come to participate in this study,” DeSantes said. “So it’s a very heavily-pretreated patient population to begin with.”
Neuroblastoma is one of the most common early childhood cancers, affecting immature nerve cells, called neuroblasts. In this combination approach, the molecule MIBG linked to iodine-131 is given as a targeted radiation therapy to sensitize neuroblastoma cells to immunotherapy treatment: nivolumab, a checkpoint inhibitor commonly used in adult cancer patients, and dinutuximab beta, which targets an antigen called GD2 that is expressed by neuroblastoma cells.
Dinutuximab beta is a variation of the dinutuximab that is currently approved for use in the U.S. The U.S. version is given intravenously for 4 to 20 hours a day for four consecutive days, and because healthy nerve cells also express GD2, the treatments are very painful. That’s why patients must be treated in-patient at the hospital. Read more…