The eleventh scientiWc conference progress in vaccination against cancer (PIVAC-11) was held 10–13 October in Copenhagen, Denmark. Currently, the success of cancer immunotherapy as treatment modality is improving and newly approved drugs and immunotherapies are showing encouraging clinical results. To be eVective, cancer vaccination needs to stimulate powerful immune responses against speciWc targets as well as overcome the barriers that cancer cells use to protect themselves. Especially, new drugs (i.e. Ipilimumab) have demonstrated that targeting suppressive elements leads to highly improved clinical outcome. PIVAC-11 was characterized by much optimism and interesting new data on how to improve cancer vaccination were presented. Talks were given on aspects of combination therapies, genetic vaccinations, combinations of chemotherapy and immunotherapy and tumor immune escape mechanisms. The conference opened with a keynote evening, addressing the use of adoptive transfer of T cells in cancer patients. Patrick Hwu (Houston, TX, USA) presented the latest results of a phase II clinical trial based on adoptive cell therapy (ACT) with tumor inWltrating lymphocytes (TILs) at MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC). Thus far, 41 melanoma patients have been treated, 2/38 (5%) showed complete responses (CR) and 16/38 (42%) had a partial response (PR). The frequency of CD8 T cells but not CD4 T cells in TILs correlated with better clinical response (CR/PR). Intriguingly, the frequency of CD8 T cells with surface expression of the inhibitory receptor “B and T Lymphocyte Attenuator” (BTLA) in TILs also correlated with better prognosis. Hwu pointed out that a major rate-limiting step in ACT seems to be the ineYcient T-cell migration to tumors. His group has shown that melanoma speciWc T cells do not express CXCR2—the receptor for CXCL1 and CXCL8 expressed in melanomas, and the insertion of genes encoding this chemokine receptor into TILs may improve T-cell migration and result in better CR. Hwu presented data from murine model studies showing that gp 100-speciWc T cells transduced with CXCR2 (receptor for CXCL1 and IL-8) have enhanced accumulation in tumors, delay tumor growth and lead to improved survival. Furthermore, the combination of anti-PD-1 and BRAF inhibitors with ACT treatment is currently being investigated in mice. Interestingly, data showed that increased anti-tumor activity and enhancement of migration of T cells into tumors could be found. Next, Ton Schumacher (Amsterdam, Holland) demonstrated—by analyses of more than 30 TIL products—that both the magnitude and frequency of tumor-speciWc T cells was very low in TILs. The group used a high throughput multimer-based method for T-cell detection (“combi-coding”) and analyzed the presence of T cells speciWc for a panel of 145 HLA-A2-restricted known CD8 T-cell melanomaassociated epitopes [from both melanocyte diVerentiation (MD), cancer testis (CT) and overexpressed (OE) antigens]. It turned out that every patient had a unique combination of antigen-speciWc T cells. In addition, he demonstrated that This meeting report is a summary of presentations from the Eleventh International Conference on Progress in Vaccination against Cancer, PIVAC-11, published together with a series of Focussed Research Reviews based on lectures given at the conference.