Duane Mitchell, MD, PhD, co-director of the University of Florida’s Preston A. Wells Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy, leads the MATCHPOINT trial. The therapy harnesses adoptive cell therapy (ACT), which programs a patient’s T cells (white blood cells critical to the body) to seek and destroy cancer cells. In a previous study (ReMATCH), Dr. Mitchell’s lab demonstrated ACT’s significant promise as a safe and effective treatment for relapsed medulloblastoma. One patient saw a nearly total elimination of widespread metastatic disease.
MATCHPOINT will test this technique in an initial pilot study of six patients with relapsed Group 4 tumors. Dr. Mitchell seeks to amplify the ACT’s effectiveness by combining it with an immune checkpoint blockade. This drug revents the tumor from protecting itself with immune checkpoints. In a checkpoint, the tumor cell binds with an immune cell and sends a stop signal to the attacking T cell. The blockade drug eliminates this line of defense, which increases the immunotherapy’s effectiveness.
“The ultimate goal is we want to cure kids with brain cancers and see immunotherapy treatments move into frontline treatments to perhaps avoid or diminish some of the toxicities of standard treatments we use now,” says Dr. Mitchell. He anticipates patient recruitment by fall 2024.
