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VIDEO: Increased knowledge of T cells drives field toward improving tumor vaccine responses
Jonathan Serody, MD, associate director of translational research at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, discusses T lymphocytes, antigen-presenting cells and tumor vaccines.
“What’s been clear in the past 5 years is that tumor cells can generate proteins that block the activation of T cells,” he says. “Most of the recent work has been around the generation of antibodies that will block the proteins that tumor cells express, thereby recovering T-cell function allowing T cells to destroy the tumor cells.”
Serody offers background on the advances in understanding the tumor microenvironment and the mechanisms of newly-developed therapies, touching on graft-versus-host disease and the differences in immunosuppression between liquid and solid tumors.
He highlights two specific areas researchers have been targeting to improve vaccine responses — using virally-modified lymphocytes to engage tumor cells and using oncolytic viruses to destroy immunosuppressive cells.
He underscores “extremely potent activity” already observed with chimeric antigen receptor modified T cells in leukemia and the anticipation of results from trials looking at breast cancer, glioblastoma, neuroblastoma and potentially lung cancer.