Brain tumor program fights cancer with cancer

November 28, 2012
Dr. Daniela Bota

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 ›