Abstract PL04-03: Fatal Attraction: A new story featuring the immune system and pancreatic cancer

Abstract

Abstract Until recently, barriers to immunotherapy clinical successes for pancreatic cancer have been due to a lack of understanding of the immune pathways within the pancreatic tumor microenvironment that hinder successful immune responses. Recent advances have identified new targets for developing cancer specific vaccines and new targets for modulating the tumor microenvironment to allow more potent activation and improved access of vaccine induced immune responses. We are just learning that non-neoplastic cells, including cancer-associated myofibroblasts, regulatory T cells, dendritic cells, myeloid-derived suppressor cells, and tumor-associated macrophages, are hijacked by pre-invasive and invasive cancer cells to create a tolerogenic tumor microenvironment. Current research is focused on elucidating the mechanisms of this tolerogenic polarization within the tumor microenvironment with the goal of tipping the balance in favor of an anticancer immune response. With the recent advances in molecular technologies and the development of relevant pancreatic cancer mouse models, it is now within our reach to dissect the inhibitory pathways within the pancreatic tumor microenvironment. This will in turn, lead to new therapeutic opportunities that will eliminate these barriers and convert this deadly cancer into a treatable disease. Building on our extensive experience developing immunotherapies for pancreatic cancer, we are now developing combinatorial immunotherapies that combine T cell inducing agents with agents that modulate T cell down regulatory signals within the tumor microenvironment. These studies have shown for the first time that traditionally “non-immunogenic” cancers that do not respond to single agent immune modulating agents, can be converted into tumors susceptible to these agents if a T cell inducing vaccine is given together with these immune modulating agents. Results from both pre-clinical and clinical studies will be discussed.