Year 4

High-grade gliomas, the most common primary brain tumors in adults, have a poor prognosis and remain incurable with current therapies. These devastating tumors present significant treatment challenges; 1) surgery may cause permanent neurologic damage; 2) surgery misses cancer cells that have invaded beyond the tumor edge to other sites in the brain; 3) many, if not most, chemotherapy drugs cannot enter the brain because of the blood-brain barrier; and 4) chemotherapy drugs are toxic to normal tissues as well as tumor, causing undesirable side effects. Therefore, if therapeutic agents could be concentrated and localized to the tumor sites, treatment efficacy may improve while side effects are minimized.

Our goal is to bring to the clinic a human Neural Stem Cell (NSC)-based treatment strategy that produces potent localized anti-tumor effects while minimizing toxic side effects. NSCs have a natural ability to home to invasive brain tumor cells throughout the brain. NSCs, used as a delivery vehicle, offer a novel way to selectively target chemotherapy to brain tumor sites. NSCs are modified to express a certain enzyme (carboxylesterase; CE), that converts systemically administered prodrug (irinotecan) to a much more potent form (SN-38), that is up to 1000 times more effective at killing brain tumor cells.

Milestones reached in our fourth year include:
(1) receiving regulatory approval from the NIH/OBA following a public form in September, 2013.
(2) determining the dose and timing of NSC and irinotecan administration for optimal therapeutic efficacy in pre-clinical brain tumor models.
(3) demonstrating that the CE-expressing NSCs can increase concentrations of the toxic drug SN-38 by > 6-fold compared to giving irinotecan alone. Furthermore, SN-38 concentrations were dose proportional to administered irinotecan concentrations.
(4) Safety-toxicity studies required by the FDA for Investigational New Drug (IND) approval were completed. These studies demonstrated no significant toxicities and safety of our NSC treatment protocol in preclinical brain tumor models.

Our results to date support our hypothesis that a safe and effective NSC-mediated therapy can be developed for clinical use in patients with high-grade glioma, with potential application to other types of brain tumor and brain tumor metastases. We hope to initiate clinical trials with our CE-expressing NSCs and irinotecan by the end of 2014.