Immunotherapy and Vaccines Inspire Hope in Glioblastoma Care

The idea of finding a targeted agent or getting immunotherapy to work in patients with glioblastoma fills those in the neuro-oncology field with hope and optimism, according to Andrew Brenner, MD, PhD.

CancerNetwork® spoke with Brenner, a professor of medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, about recent results from the phase 1/2 ReSPECT-GBM trial (NCT01906385) that evaluated rhenium obisbemeda in patients with recurrent glioma. Findings from this trial showed that the agent improved median overall survival compared with other standards of care in recurrent glioma.

Brenner said that the heterogeneity of glioblastoma makes it difficult to utilize targeted therapies because of the tumor’s ability to adapt. As a result of that, experts in the field look toward immunotherapies such as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies and dendritic cell vaccines as potential avenues of care that hold the promise and potential to advance glioblastoma care.

Transcript:

There’s a lot of hope and optimism that we are going to either find a targeted agent or get immunotherapy to work. So far, we’ve had a lot of difficulty with targeted agents because of the significant heterogeneity of these tumors and their ability to adapt, where you block one pathway [and] another one just pops up and basically circumvents anything that you’re inhibiting. We’ve tried a number of different things, like EGFR inhibitors and PARP inhibitors, over the years, but there’s still significant hope for immunotherapies. Maybe not the conventional checkpoint inhibitors that we are seeing work for other tumor types like lung cancer and melanoma but rather in a cellular therapy like CAR T or dendritic cell vaccines, where we use the patient’s tumor to train the immune system to attack the tumor. Dendritic cell vaccines, CAR T-cell therapy, and things of that nature are holding some promise.

Reference

Brenner AJ, Patel T, Bao A, et al. Convection enhanced delivery of rhenium (186Re) obisbemeda (186RNL) in recurrent glioma: a multicenter, single arm, phase 1 clinical trial. Nat Commun. 2025;16(1):2079. doi:10.1038/s41467-025-57263-1