New Scientist: Fatal brain cancer tamed by gene therapy

Fatal brain cancer tamed by gene therapy - 25 February 2008 :

Previous attempts to treat glioblastomas with gene therapy failed because some tumour cells survived and regrew. The new treatment overcomes this problem by permanently priming the immune system to pick off any straggler tumour cells.

A harmless virus that only infects fast-dividing cancer cells is injected directly into the brain... One gene, HSV1-TK, kills the cancer cells by activating ganciclovir...

And here's the cool bit:

...a second gene, Flt3L... summons immune "dendritic" cells from the bloodstream into the brain.

(How does it do that?)

[The dendritic] cells engulf the debris and transport it back to lymph nodes, where they re-prime the immune system to attack any remaining tumour cells during and after treatment.

Lymph nodes seem like a gunnery school for white blood cells: you go there to learn how to distinguish friend from foe. (BTW fevers seem to help lymph nodes do their jobs.)