'EXPANDing immune cells and their tumor antigens during checkpoint immunotherapy' - Invited speaker seminar

'Meet the PhD Jury' invited speaker seminar by Prof. Diether Lambrechts (Science Director & Group Leader,
Center for Cancer Biology, VIB - KU Leuven & Full Professor, Dept. of Human Genetics, KU Leuven).

Prof. Diether Lambrechts is jury member of the PhD defence of Alvaro Marcos Rubio.  
 

Cancer immunotherapy using immune-checkpoint blockade (ICB) has created a paradigm shift in the treatment of advanced-stage cancers. In terms of lives saved and person-years restored, these therapies promise to be more significant than any other form of cancer treatment. However, one of the major limitations of ICB is that it provides durable clinical responses only in a fraction of patients. Single-cell (spatial) technologies have been exceptionally instrumental in highlighting how checkpoint immunotherapy works in some patients, and why not in other patients. During my talk, I will highlight how T-cells respond differently to these therapies, which surrounding microenvironments are needed to provide durable responses and where in the tumor tissue these T-cells need to be located. I will also highlight how responding T-cells and the tumor antigens that they recognize can be characterized, and how this information can be harnessed to develop novel synergistic therapies that can be combined with approved checkpoint inhibitors.