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 blockers and CAR-Ts, these current immunotherapeutic approaches are limited to few cancers and the safety concerns with many serious adverse events have severely limited their benefits for most patients. New safer and more effective cancer immunotherapy approaches are urgently needed to improve patient outcomes.

Based on our emerging understanding of antitumour immunity, the central role of Dendritic cells (DCs) in the generation of the key effectors of cancer immunotherapy, cytoxic T-cells (CTLs), DC-based approaches are clearly the way forward. However, as numerous cancer genome sequencing projects have unequivocally established that the tumours of individual patients are all genetically distinct, truly effective cancer immunotherapy approaches have to be personalised. Moreover, all acquired immune responses are governed by the MHC, which is also specific to individual patients, reinforcing the requirement for cancer immunotherapy to be personalised for maximum benefit for cancer treatment.

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.