Funding Agency:

National Institute of Health

Total Project Period:

03/01/10 - 02/28/12

Total Project Award:

$500,000

Principal Investigators:

Ian Pollack, MD; Hideho Okada, MD, PhD

Co-Investigators:

Lisa Butterfield, Ronald Hamilton, Regina Jakacki, Theresa Whiteside

Project Summary:

We hypothesize that vaccine-based immunotherapy will not only prove to be a non-toxic treatment option for pediatric gliomas, but will also demonstrate activity as assessed by clinical, radiologic, and immunologic parameters. To address these hypotheses, we propose studies with the following specific aims:

1. To assess the safety of a vaccination regimen using multiple glioma-associated antigen (GAA) peptides and immunoadjuvant therapy after irradiation for children with newly diagnosed brainstem and subtotally resected high-grade gliomas.
2. To determine the rate and magnitude of immune response in post-vaccine peripheral blood mononuclear cells against GAA peptides, in response to peptide-based vaccine therapy, using IFN-ã-enzyme-linked immuno-spot (ELISPOT) and tetramer assays.

Our clinical study and correlative immunological analyses will represent the first application of a multipeptide epitope vaccine-based strategy to a pediatric glioma cohort, and will provide fundamental data for assessing safety and immunological efficacy of immunotherapeutic strategies in the pediatric brain tumor context.

Preliminary data regarding clinical and imaging responses to therapy will also be obtained, which together with the safety and immunological efficacy data will provide a foundation for future therapeutic trials of this approach.