Grant: Project Grant

Immunotherapy is a relatively new area of cancer treatment that focuses on energizing a patient's immune system so it can fight cancer itself, which reduces the need to use harmful drugs, such as chemotherapy. One approach for this kind of therapy is to genetically modify a patient's own immune cells to recognize and kill their cancer. This has been remarkably successful in some blood cancers, but ineffective in cancers that form solid tumours. One reason for this is that solid tumours actively suppress the immune system by producing harmful products that trick the immune system into deactivating itself. Our project aims to (1) examine how these products cause immune suppression and (2) modify immune cells to enable them to disrupt the activity of these products, thereby allowing them to overcome immune suppression. These modifications can be combined with existing therapies to facilitate cancer cell recognition, the avoidance of immune suppression, and tumour eradication by a patient's immune cells.