A statement from the Clinical Department, Applied Radiation Oncology U.S., said Ene received the award at the 2019 American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) Annual Scientific Meeting held from April 13 to April 17 in San Diego.
The-37-year-old, who is from Akpugo in Nkanu West Local Government Area of Enugu State, won the award with his research work on ‘Anti-PD-L1 Immunotherapy Enhances Radiation-induced Abscopal Response in Glioblastoma’.
Journalists gathered that Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that helps the immune system fight cancer.
The immune system made up of white blood cells, organs and tissues of the lymph system help the body fight infections and other diseases.
Immunotherapy for glioblastoma has been largely unsuccessful in part because molecular heterogeneity drives selective elimination of only a subset of tumour cells.
According to the statement, it appears that therapeutic success in patients would require achieving an abscopal effect, where following focused radiation therapy, non-targeted tumour cells are attacked by the immune system.
The statement further revealed that it remains unclear how glioblastoma responds to focused radiation in terms of failure location and whether immunotherapy could amplify the immune response to tumour outside the radiation field.
The result of the study’s experiment shows that radiation combined with anti PD L1 therapy induces an immunological response to unirradiated glioblastoma. The researchers are currently optimizing other treatment combinations that could also be readily assessed in phase I human clinical trials.