A new approach to Cancer Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy has recently emerged as a paradigm shift in the treatment of cancerl with many long-term survivals raising the hope of cures. However, despite significant progress with checkpoint bloakers and CAR-Ts, the applicability of these current immunotherapeutic approaches is limited to a few types of cancer and safety concerns with their serious adverse events have severely limited their benefits for many patients. 

New safe and effective approaches are urgently needed. Based on our emerging understanding of antitumour immunity and the central role of Dendritic cells (DCs) in the generation of cytoxic T-cells (CTLs), the key effectors of cancer immunotherapy, DC-based approaches show the most potential. However numerous cancer genome sequencing programmes have established that the tumours of all patients are genetically individual and, as all acquired immune responses are governed by the MHC and thus specific to individual patients, effective cancer immunotherapy approaches have to be personalised.

Our approach is thus to develop personalised DC-based cancer immunotherapy by using the patients own DCs and tumour cells to efficiently overcome the genetic heterogeneity of individual patients cancers.