Current projects

  1. Clinical trials (See Figure 1 below) 
    1. DART - Durvalumab After chemoRadioTherapy (DART) for NSCLC patients – a phase II translational and biomarker study investigating PDL1 positive and negative patients
    2. NIPU - Nivolumab and ipilimumab +/- UV1 vaccination as second line treatment in patients with malignant mesothelioma
    3. COM-IT-2 - Combinatory ImmunoTherapy-2 (Com-IT-2) - a phase 2 randomised open two-arm study to assess the tolerability and efficacy of immunotherapy combined with extensive radiotherapy for the treatment of stage IV non-small cell lung cancer
    4. PILoT - PeriAdjuvant Immunotherapy with vaccine for stage III non-small cell Lung cancer that is resecTable
  2. Translational projects exploring mechanisms of treatment response and resistance (see Figure 1 below) 
    1. Gut microbiome profiling to identify alterations during chemoradiation and immunotherapy and identify biomarkers for therapy response
    2. Immune cell profiling of primary tumour tissue by multiplex immunohistochemistry and RNA-sequencing 
    3. Circulating immune markers to study immune response to therapy and identify predictive biomarkers (profiling of immune cells and cytokines)
    4. Evaluation of dual-time PET to elucidate tumour cell composition in response to therapy for patients with pleural mesothelioma in the NIPU-trial)
  3. Drug repurposing (a CanCell collaborative project) (See Figure 2 below)
    The potential for repurposing of ALK-inhbitors to patients with ALK-negative NSCLC is studied by: 
    1. Cell line studies
    2. Cell line drug screens
    3. PDX-models
Figure 1: Clinical trials and translational studies exploring the immune response to therapy

 

Figure 2: Repurposing of ALK-inhibitors to patients with ALK-negative NSCLC