September 9, 2015

cancer immunotherapy

Immunotherapy has been hailed as an exciting and emerging branch of cancer medicine.  Over the last six months we’ve heard about promising results from trials of ipilimumab and nivolumab for melanoma, and nivolumab for lung cancer – but what might be the future of cancer immunotherapy, and might we see it being widely added to the armoury of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery for some cancers?

The inaugural International Cancer Immunotherapy Conference (an American Association for Cancer Research meeting) will take place in New York later this month. Three UK cancer immunotherapy experts came to the SMC to discuss things such as:

• What do we know so far from clinical trials of cancer immunotherapies?
• What are checkpoint inhibitors and how do they work?
• What are monoclonal antibodies and how does antibody therapy work?
• Is cancer immunotherapy one thing or lots of different things?
• Do these drugs work equally well in all patients?
• Do we know why some individuals or some tumours don’t respond?
• Do these drugs permanently change patients’ immune systems?
• What do we know about potential side-effects?
• Have we seen data on patient survival or just tumour shrinkage?

Speakers:

Prof. Peter Johnson, Professor of Medical Oncology, University of Southampton

Prof. Martin Glennie, Professor of Immunochemistry and Head of Cancer Sciences, University of Southampton

Dr Sergio Quezada, Professorial Research Fellow and Group Leader of the Immune Regulation and Tumour Immunotherapy Group, Cancer Immunology Unit, UCL Cancer Institute