A Protein Called MALT1 Could Help the Immune System Turn on Glioblastoma

Mayo Clinic researchers may have found a new way to get the immune system to stop protecting glioblastoma and start fighting it instead.

Here's the problem they're up against: glioblastoma tumors are experts at manipulating the immune cells around them, essentially convincing those cells to stand guard for the cancer instead of attacking it. That's a big part of why this tumor is so hard to treat, even with surgery, radiation, and chemo.

In a new preclinical study published in Nature Communications, researchers found that blocking a protein called MALT1 seems to "flip a switch" on those immune cells, shifting them out of protect-the-tumor mode and into attack-the-tumor mode. In animal models, blocking MALT1 on its own slowed tumor growth. Combined with temozolomide, the chemo drug most commonly used against glioblastoma, it made the chemo noticeably more effective, and meaningfully extended survival compared to chemo alone.

"Glioblastoma is extraordinarily difficult to treat, in part because the tumor is able to manipulate the immune cells around it and create an environment that protects the cancer," said lead researcher Juliana Yerneni, Ph.D. "Our findings point to a potential approach to disrupting that protection and, importantly, to making an existing treatment more effective."

Worth being clear about: this is still animal-model research, not something available to patients. Researchers still need to figure out which types of glioblastoma are most likely to respond to a MALT1-targeting treatment before this could move toward clinical trials. But it's a genuinely promising direction, one more example of the immune system, not just chemo or radiation, becoming part of the fight against this disease.

Source: Mayo Clinic News Network — study published in Nature Communications