As a neurosurgeon who regularly treats glioblastoma, Dr. Adam Sonabend is interested in the rise of immunotherapy, a new way to help cancer patients use the power of their own immune system.

But until now, the outlook for patients with glioblastoma, an incurable aggressive brain tumor, is not optimistic.

"This is a terrible disease," he said.

However, a new study conducted by neurosurgeon Sonabend and his associate professor of neurosurgery and colleagues at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine suggests that some patients may benefit from immunotherapy.

Frustrated by the limitations of his work, Sonabend was attracted to glioblastoma research. As a surgeon, he said: "I can improve patients' symptoms; I can make them feel better." But for glioblastoma, "it always recurs."

Patients with glioblastoma can receive radiotherapy and chemotherapy, but the cancer will recur, and unlike other cancers, there are no available treatments that can prolong survival when they relapse.

Approximately 12,000 cases of glioblastoma are diagnosed each year; symptoms may include seizures, headaches, blurred vision, and confusion. This is an aggressive cancer that may occur in the brain or spinal cord. According to the study, it cannot be cured, and the median survival time is approximately 21 months.

At the same time, progress in other cancers through immunotherapy (a treatment that helps the body's immune system fight cancer) has made promise. Cancer cells have learned to brake the immune system to prevent it from attacking cancer cells, thereby allowing them to replicate. Immunotherapy can basically lift the brakes imposed by cancer on immune cells.

Glioblastoma is the type of cancer diagnosed by Senator John McCain, Senator Edward Kennedy, and Bo Biden (the son of President Joe Biden); Lea Grover, a resident of Cary, wrote an article about her husband for 13 years A blog about the experience of suffering from this disease.

In Illinois, doctors have been using immunotherapy in different ways.

Sonabend and his colleagues hope that their research will help patients with brain tumors more easily obtain immunotherapy options.

"This is the exciting part of this discovery. It does show which patients might benefit from this immunotherapy," he said.

Researchers were able to find mutations in some patients’ tumors in a previous study, which seemed to help them benefit from immunotherapy.

Currently, patients with glioblastoma cannot receive immunotherapy because doctors cannot determine who might benefit from it.

Previously, several clinical trials for patients with glioblastoma tested the effects of immunotherapy, but did not show an increase in overall survival. But some patients did show a strong reaction.

Sonabend and the researchers studied this subset to see if they were any different.

They discovered a biomarker identified as phosphorylated ERK, which can help inform which patients can live longer. By staining the tumor mass under a microscope, they found that immunotherapy is the most effective when the patient has many of these biomarkers.

The study, published in the journal Nature Cancer on November 29, details how immunotherapy can lead to "unprecedented expansion of cancer treatments leading to long-term remissions" for other cancers, such as melanoma, lung cancer, and kidney cancer.

For glioblastoma, the possibilities of immunotherapy have so far been limited.

Next, a clinical trial will be conducted to see if the patient responds. Although any conversion to treatment will take time, and this will only affect a small percentage of patients with glioblastoma, Sonabend hopes this is the beginning.

"It's all very exciting," he said.