UTSA researchers lend expertise to improve treatment for childhood brain cancers

MARCH 24, 2025 — Thomas Forsthuber, UTSA's Jesse H. and Mary Gibbs Jones Endowed Chair in Biotechnology, collaborated with researchers and pediatric neurosurgeons at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh to develop a new way to profile brain cancers in children, paving the way for improved diagnostics and treatments.

Brain cancer is the second most common cancer in children after leukemia, and it is also the deadliest, due to the fact that brain tumors are diverse, resistant to treatments and often hard to access surgically.

Forsthuber co-authored an article entitled “The T cell receptor landscape of childhood brain tumors” that was recently published in Science Translational Medicine. The article describes the researchers using a diagnostic platform that could classify brain tumors based on the body’s cancer-fighting immune response. This approach, which is complementary to traditional microscopic and genetic cancer cell analyses, establishes a new method to adapt cancer therapies to each patient’s unique immune response and harnesses the success of immunotherapies that revolutionized the treatment of childhood leukemias.

Thomas Forsthuber

“This collaborative research effort has yielded a potential breakthrough in the fight against pediatric brain cancer, a devastating disease that profoundly affects children and their families,” said Forsthuber. “Dr. Itay Raphael, the lead author on this project and a former doctoral student at UTSA who trained in my lab, led this important work. The project incorporated our expertise in T cell immunology to provide fundamental new insights that could pave the way for innovative immunotherapies that will more effectively target these challenging tumors.”

The significant reduction of deaths from leukemia over recent decades is due in part to the enormous success of immune-based therapies, which harness the body’s intrinsic protective mechanisms by expanding the pool of cancer-fighting white blood cells called T cells.

T cells are precisely tuned to recognize molecules on the surface of cancer cells, called antigens, and use them as signals to attack and clear out tumor cells while leaving healthy cells intact. When T cells find a target on the tumor cell surface, they become activated and start rapidly doubling their numbers in a process called clonal expansion, aimed to clear the cancer.

Forsthuber contributed significantly to the research and data collection, writing and reviewing of the article’s manuscript, and providing his immunobiology expertise. He was joined by Lance Schwegman, who graduated from UTSA last fall with a B.S. in microbiology and immunology. Schwegman contributed to the studies by analyzing T-cell reactivity to new tumor antigens. Schwegman was a part of the MARC program, a research training program funded by the NIH that prepares its members for doctoral programs in the behavioral and biomedical sciences.

As part of the study, the researchers profiled nearly 1,000 pediatric brain tumor samples, which were collected through the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN), a medical research consortium of 37 medical centers across the nation and globally.

“Understanding how the repertoire of immune cells fits with the diverse landscape of brain cancer types can help us find new therapies in the future,” said Raphael, research assistant professor of neurological surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Raphael earned his Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology from UTSA.

Adapted by Ryan Schoensee from the March 19, 2025 press release “Classifying Childhood Brain Cancers by Immune Response May Improve Diagnostics and Treatments” published by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.