Optimizing the role of immunotherapy for the treatment of glioblastoma

Glioblastoma (GB) is the most frequent malignant primary brain tumor and one of the deadliest cancers in adults. GB patients have a poor prognosis with a short survival rate. This dismal outcome together with the lack of effective therapies leads to an urgent clinical need for new therapeutic options. One of such options are immunotherapies, which modulate the immune system to boost the elimination of cancer cells and to induce long-lasting remissions. It has already been recognized that the brain is a region of active immunosurveillance, able of generate robust immune responses. This opened the possibility for the implementation of immunotherapies for the treatment of GB. Immunotherapies trialed for these patients include immune checkpoint inhibitors, tumor vaccines, adoptive cell transfer, and viral therapies. Despite all the recent advances and the promising results, immunotherapies have not yet been approved for the management of these patients, due to low efficacy. Innovative approaches using combination of therapies may improve the success of immunotherapies in GB. In this chapter, we give insight about the immune landscape of GB and the current state-of-the-art in immunotherapies for this disease.