Development of immunotherapy programmes focussed on specific solid tumours where there are strong clinical academic teams is a major focus for the CIIC.
The over-arching aims of our clinical research programmes in solid tumours are to understand how immune responses in patients can affect both prognosis and response to treatment, to define which sets of patients are likely to benefit from new immunotherapy treatments, and develop and test new ways to exploit the immune system to more effectively eradicate tumour cells.
Specific areas of interest include therapeutic targeting of the tumour microenvironment, targeting of immunosuppressive populations, development of novel cancer vaccination approaches, antibody arming strategies, and development of personalised immunotherapy approaches, including checkpoint blockade.
Our solid tumour clinical trials portfolio addresses several of these therapeutic concepts, which synergise strongly with our fundamental research on tumour antigen selection, tumour microenvironment, and immunotherapeutic strategies.
The clinicians and researchers focussing on this area are based at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, Birmingham Children’s Hospital, the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences, and the Institute of Immunology and Immunotherapy.