Clinical and Developmental Immunology
Volume 2010 (2010), Article ID 689171, 18 pages
doi:10.1155/2010/689171
Review Article

Overview of Cellular Immunotherapy for Patients with Glioblastoma

Elodie Vauleon,1,2 Tony Avril,1 Brigitte Collet,1 Jean Mosser,2 and Véronique Quillien1,2

1Département de Biologie, Centre Eugène Marquis, Rue de la bataille Flandres Dunkerque, CS44229, 35042 Rennes cedex, France
2UMR6061 CNRS, Université de Rennes 1, IFR 140, CS34317, 35043 Rennes cedex, France

Received 30 June 2010; Revised 13 August 2010; Accepted 27 August 2010

Academic Editor: David Kaplan

Copyright © 2010 Elodie Vauleon et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

High grade gliomas (HGG) including glioblastomas (GBM) are the most common and devastating primary brain tumours. Despite important progresses in GBM treatment that currently includes surgery combined to radio- and chemotherapy, GBM patients' prognosis remains very poor. Immunotherapy is one of the new promising therapeutic approaches that can specifically target tumour cells. Such an approach could also maintain long term antitumour responses without inducing neurologic defects. Since the past 25 years, adoptive and active immunotherapies using lymphokine-activated killer cells, cytotoxic T cells, tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes, autologous tumour cells, and dendritic cells have been tested in phase I/II clinical trials with HGG patients. This paper inventories these cellular immunotherapeutic strategies and discusses their efficacy, limits, and future perspectives for optimizing the treatment to achieve clinical benefits for GBM patients.