How to stop brain cancer–with rabies

This (and dendritic cell vaccines, and inactivated poliovirus, and...) all can be traced back to an observation that the only people with good outcomes from glioblastoma were those with listeriosis in the past.

Steve Forman at City of Hope has reported some excellent results using CAR-T cells in GBM (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1610497) and Linda Liau at UCLA has seen good results combining checkpoint inhibitors with dendritic cell vaccines (https://insight.jci.org/articles/view/87059).

The fundamental problem with aggressive brain cancers (the most commonly diagnosed kind in adults, unfortunately) is that "excellent" means "the patients survived an average of two years instead of one!"

It's nasty stuff. I work on acute leukemias, which aren't much better, but at least we see some durable cures now and then.