2020
November
SITC 2020 - 35th Anniversary Annual Meeting
November 25, 2020
Last week, the ACIR team attended the virtual 35th Anniversary Annual Meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC). This week’s extensive special feature covers selected talks from the conference. We have organized the content by topics below. Immune checkpoint blockadeJim AllisonIra MellmanNils RudqvistKurt JenkinsBig dataMatt SpitzerYardena SamuelsAnastasia ProkopiArlene SharpeClinical trials of...
Delivery routes for better T cell outcomes
November 18, 2020
Personalized cancer vaccines have demonstrated safety and potency in early clinical trials; however, the magnitudes of T cell responses have been limited, and definitive positive clinical effects have not been demonstrated. These results suggest that improving the magnitude may be beneficial, and that the quality of vaccine-responding T cells must also be considered...
Directing the dendritic cell response with ISIM
November 11, 2020
T cells get a lot of attention in cancer immunotherapy, but dendritic cells are what drive T cell responses forward. Honing in on strategies that kickstart dendritic cells to induce strong antitumor T cell responses in otherwise cold tumors, Oba and Long et al. designed a rational, multi-step combination therapy called in situ immunomodulation...
ICOSL expression crucial for DC vaccines
November 4, 2020
Even though therapeutic dendritic cell-based vaccines are immunogenic, clinical responses to these therapies are often minimal. To address this issue, Maurer et al. focused on comprehensively examining the characteristics of DCs used in such vaccines to determine whether patient-specific characteristics affect efficacy. As a DC source, the researchers turned to samples available from a...
