Brain tumor program fights cancer with cancer
November 28, 2012
IN THE NEWS: The Orange County Register interviewed UC Irvine neuro-oncologist Dr. Daniela Bota about brain vaccines as a way to complement traditional brain cancer treatments:
Military metaphors are hard to avoid when describing the work in Daniela Bota’s lab.
Petri dishes become training camps, where cells taken from patients “learn” to attack a patient’s brain tumor.
Then, they are re-injected into the patient to seek out and destroy the enemy.
Bota, a UC Irvine neuro-oncologist, is conducting three separate human trials of brain tumor vaccines, with a fourth on the horizon.
And all four are potentially significant advances in the rapidly expanding realm of “personalized medicine” – drafting a patient’s own cells in the fight against disease.
“It’s the wave of the future,” Bota told a recent visitor to her lab, where the brains of laboratory mice bred to grow human tumors are revealing the tumors’ secrets – and their vulnerabilities.
UC Irvine brain tumor program fights cancer with cancer ›