Cancer Immunotherapies Landscape: Challenges and Future

Immune Checkpoint blockade (ICB) has revolutionised the treatment landscape for multiple cancer types. However, a minority of patients respond (~30%) and resistance is common. Multiple resistance mechanisms (extrinsic vs intrinsic, primary vs acquired) have been defined from clinical studies. Despite this, there are still multiple challenges to define which contribute to poor response and/or relapse, owing to a lack of reliable biomarkers for response and different caveats from the conventional in vitro/in vivo models used to recapitulate the tumour microenvironment (TME). In this talk, Sofia Lourenco will speak about how her specialised, thematic Alliances enable a deeper deconvolution across the multiple compartments present in the tumour microenvironment. By leveraging her network of academics and clinicians for access to patient samples/datasets, providing a physiological benchmark for the development of suitable in vitro/in vivo models and further bioinformatics capabilities, she can gain an in-depth understanding of complex multifactorial processes, as well as target ID exercises feeding the pipeline of novel immunotherapies.