Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have developed a revolutionary gel that cured 100% of mice with aggressive brain cancer, offering new hope for treating glioblastoma, one of the deadliest brain tumors in humans.

New Hydrogel Therapy Successfully Cured Brain Cancer in Mice but Could This Innovative Gel Be the Key to Curing Glioblastoma?

Johns Hopkins University scientists have made a significant breakthrough in brain cancer treatment with the development of a novel gel.

The gel has shown remarkable success in stopping brain tumors in mice, sparking optimism for its potential application in human treatment.

In experiments, the gel cured 100% of mice with an aggressive form of brain cancer, which could be a game-changer for patients with glioblastoma, a common and lethal brain tumor.

Lead researcher Honggang Cui says, “We think this hydrogel will be the future and will supplement current treatments for brain cancer.”

Cui and his team have created a gel by combining an anticancer drug and an antibody, which self-assembles into a solution to fill the small crevices left after brain tumor removal surgery. This gel can target areas that may have been missed during surgery and can suppress tumor growth by killing remaining cancer cells. The team’s results have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In addition, the gel seems to activate the immune response that typically struggles to fight glioblastoma in mice. After the researchers rechallenged the mice with a new glioblastoma tumor, their immune systems alone were able to fight and defeat the cancer without additional medication. The gel not only works to fend off cancer but also helps reprogram the immune system to prevent recurrence with immunological memory, according to the researchers.

The researchers noted that surgery is a necessary component of this approach. When the gel was applied directly to the brain without surgical removal of the tumor, the survival rate was only 50%.

“The surgery likely alleviates some of that pressure and allows more time for the gel to activate the immune system to fight the cancer cells,” Cui adds.

The gel solution is composed of nano-sized paclitaxel filaments, which is an FDA-approved drug for several cancers including breast and lung cancers. The filaments act as a vehicle to transport an antibody called aCD47. By uniformly coating the tumor cavity, the gel releases the medication gradually over several weeks, maintaining the active ingredients near the injection site.

The researchers utilized aCD47 antibody to tackle one of the most difficult challenges in glioblastoma research, which involves targeting macrophages, a type of cell that can either support immunity or promote cancer cells’ growth and spread.

One of the standard treatments for glioblastoma is a wafer, called Gliadel, which was co-developed by a team of scientists from Johns Hopkins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1990s. It is a biodegradable polymer approved by the FDA that delivers medication into the brain after tumor removal surgery.

According to Betty Tyler, an associate professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a co-author who played a significant role in the development of Gliadel, while Gliadel showed substantial survival rates in lab experiments, the results achieved with the new gel are some of the most remarkable the Johns Hopkins team has witnessed.

“We don’t usually see 100% survival in mouse models of this disease,” Tyler adds. “Thinking that there is potential for this new hydrogel combination to change that survival curve for glioblastoma patients is very exciting.”

The integration of anticancer drugs and antibodies in the new gel brings hope for the future treatment of glioblastoma, as this combination of therapies is challenging to administer together due to the molecular composition of the ingredients, according to researchers.

“This hydrogel combines both chemotherapy and immunotherapy intracranially,” Tyler adds. “The gel is implanted at the time of tumor resection, which makes it work really well.”

Henry Brem, a co-author at Johns Hopkins and co-developer of Gliadel, along with other brain tumor therapies in clinical trials, highlighted the difficulty of translating the results obtained from the gel in the lab into therapies that can have significant clinical benefits.

“The challenge to us now is to transfer an exciting laboratory phenomenon to clinical trials,” remarks Brem.

Source: 10.1073/pnas.2204621120