Abstract
Paediatric high-grade gliomas (pHGG) represent the leading cause of cancer-related death in childhood. With the current standard of care (SOC), the prognosis is very dismal with a 5-year survival rate of less than 20%. There is an urgent need to develop new treatment strategies to improve the overall survival. Immunotherapy to treat cancer is now considered to be one of the main pillars in cancer management and adoptive cell transfer has had enormous successes in the paediatric field in haematological malignancies. However, the therapeutic efficacy, as seen in haematological malignancies, has been lacking in solid tumours so far due to several challenges. pHGG are known for their cold immunological tumour microenvironment with few tumour infiltrating lymphocytes, have a high heterogeneity in antigen expression and are difficult to access due to the blood-brain barrier. Therefore, we aim to develop a novel therapy to overcome these challenges by combining the locoregional administration of our designed cell therapy with an immune priming strategy. We hypothesize that this combination therapy can increase the therapeutic efficacy of the SOC against pHGG.
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