BACKGROUND-Outcomes in children and adolescents with recurrent or progressive highgrade glioma are poor, with a historical median overall survival of 5.6 months. Pediatric highgrade gliomas are largely immunologically silent or "cold," with few tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes. Preclinically, pediatric brain tumors are highly sensitive to oncolytic virotherapy with genetically engineered herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) G207, which lacks genes essential for replication in normal brain tissue.
Introduction:
Current therapeutic approaches for high-risk neuroblastoma (HR-NB) include high-dose chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy; interventions that are associated with long and short-term toxicities. Effective immunotherapy holds particular promise for improving survival and quality of life by reducing exposure to cytotoxic agents. GD2, a surface glycolipid is the most common target for immunotherapy.
Areas covered:
We review the status of anti-GD2 immunotherapies currently in clinical use for neuroblastomas and novel GD2-targeted strategies in preclinical development.
Expert commentary:
Anti-GD2 monoclonal antibodies are associated with improved survival in patients in their first remission and are increasingly being used for chemorefractory and relapsed neuroblastoma. As protein engineering technology has become more accessible, newer antibody constructs are being tested. GD2 is also being targeted by natural killer cells and T-cells. Active immunity can be elicited by anti-GD2 vaccines. The rational combination of currently available and soon-to-emerge immunotherapeutic approaches, and their integration into conventional multimodality therapies will require further investigation to optimize their use for HR-NB.
ediatric cancer is rare, with fewer than 10,000 solid tumors diagnosed in children annually in the United States 1. Previous studies interrogating germline predisposition broadly across pediatric cancer types have found heritable germline predisposition in 8-12% of patients. The yield of germline predisposition detected is dependent on the genes included for analysis and variant interpretation as well as the ascertainment biases found in each cohort. Iterative data are required to expand upon the understanding of susceptibility to pediatric cancer and determine the extent to which germline data may translate into clinical practice 2-7. Certain pediatric cancer diagnoses have well-established associations with germline mutations in specific genes and should automatically prompt clinical suspicion of a cancer predisposition, for example, retinoblastoma (RB1), pleuropulmonary blastoma (DICER1), optic pathway glioma (NF1), atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumors (SMARCB1), small cell hypercalcemic ovarian tumors (SMARCA4), adrenal cortical tumors (TP53) and hypodiploid acute lymphoblastic leukemia (TP53) 8-10. Germline testing can also be critical for distinguishing between conditions like neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) and constitutional mismatch repair deficiency (CMMRD), which can be phenocopies of each other. For example, a child presenting with numerous café au lait spots and leukemia may have either of these conditions, but treatment and screening recommendations for the proband and family members will differ depending on the germline diagnosis 11. Besides the known associations of causal germline mutations, broad tumor-normal sequencing has revealed novel associations 9,12. While some of these findings likely represent population detection and do not play a role in the pathogenesis of the cancer in question 13 , other novel associations are likely causal. Population detection
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