This Program team will discover new things about immunity to cancer and virus infection and translate the information into novel therapies in patients with blood or solid cancers. The approaches will include new cellular or antibody therapies, alone or in combination. We will determine new predictive biomarkers to better select patients for therapy. We will overcome treatment resistance, improve the safety of combination therapies, and determine their best scheduling and dosing.
For 60 years, we have had only 3 effective cancer treatments: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, often used in combination.The last 5 years have produced a powerful fourth treatment: the patient's own immune system.The long standing collaborations and synergies of our multi-disciplinary teams have already underpinned many recent advances in immune-based therapies: we are now poised to develop several further immunotherapies and on track to test them in patients during the term of this grant.
We seek to understand how white blood cells detect and destroy disease, and how molecules of the immune system punch holes in diseased cells. We wish to learn how cancer can sometimes evade the immune system. Our work will also find out how some common treatments for cancer, like chemotherapy, can be used to boost the immune system and eliminate tumours. Through knowledge gained from these studies, we aim to develop new therapies that can help patients with devastating diseases like cancer.