Cancer immunotherapy: from the lab to clinical applications-Potential impact on cancer centres' organisation.

Linda Cairns,Sandrine Aspeslagh,Jon Amund Kyte,Ahmad Awada,Per Thor Straten,Paolo Ascierto,Nicolle Rekers,Christian Blank,Andrea Anichini

doi:10.3332/ecancer.2016.691

Abstract

This report covers the Immunotherapy sessions of the 2016 Organisation of European Cancer Institutes (OECI) Oncology Days meeting, which was held on 15th–17th June 2016 in Brussels, Belgium. Immunotherapy is a potential cancer treatment that uses an individual’s immune system to fight the tumour. In recent years significant advances have been made in this field in the treatment of several advanced cancers. Cancer immunotherapies include monoclonal antibodies that are designed to attack a very specific part of the cancer cell and immune checkpoint inhibitors which are molecules that stimulate or block the inhibition of the immune system. Other cancer immunotherapies include vaccines and T cell infusions. This report will summarise some of the research that is going on in this field and will give us an update on where we are at present.

Highlights

Sandrine Aspeslagh from Gustave Roussy gave a presentation entitled ‘The experimental evidence for immune-mediated cell death during chemotherapy and radiotherapy’. She discussed the mechanisms and key importance of immunogenic cell death (ICD). She discussed the mechanism of activation of the immune system which is triggered by the cellular stress generated by chemotherapy, and how it is thought to be essential for treatment response and induction of a durable post-chemotherapy immunity
The recent technological developments in the fields of pathology and immunopathology and of genomic and immunological analysis of neoplastic lesions have fostered the development of effective translational approaches that allow to understand the mechanisms of response and resistance to immunotherapy
As a clinically relevant example, it is unclear whether in patients with an existing tumour-specific T cell response combined blockade of programmed death (PD)-1 and cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated protein (CTLA)-4 will be preferable over single agent PD-1 blockade, both because of the toxicity associated with treatment and the very significant treatment costs of cancer immunotherapies

Summary

Introduction

Immunotherapy is a potential cancer treatment that uses an individual’s immune system to fight the tumour. In spite of these remarkable improvements in treatment of several advanced cancers, only a fraction of patients achieve clinical benefit from immunotherapy.

Results

Conclusion