Project description
A vaccine against pancreatic cancer
Our immune system has a remarkable ability to identify and kill infected or abnormal cells such as cancer cells that express ‘foreign’ antigens. However, cancer is known to counteract immune system function through a number of strategies. The EU-funded PAVE project focuses on pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), one of the most aggressive and fatal cancers, and aims to develop vaccines to boost or reactivate the immune system against the disease. These vaccines are expected to overcome the limitations posed by the tumour microenvironment and the low number of tumour-infiltrating immune cells. Moreover, researchers aim to tackle the recent discovery that PDAC hijacks the immune system to support its growth.
Objective
A Nanovaccine Approach For The Treatment of Pancreatic Cancer By Multicomponent Immuno-Modulation: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the fourth leading cause of cancer deaths in men and women and still fatal in over 90% of patients. It is characterised by its extremely aggressive nature where it is also responsible for the highest mortality rate compared to other major cancers, resulting in excess of 250,000 deaths worldwide per annum. Current state-of-art therapies for advanced PDAC including chemo- and/or radiotherapy, despite extensive efforts, have met with only limited success.
Surgery is only applicable for those with early stages of the disease, or to relieve symptoms, if the cancer is blocking the bile duct or the bowel. There are two major reasons for the resistance of PDAC to conventional therapy. Firstly, PDAC has a very defining hallmark, where an abundance of stromal content is present in the tumour microenvironment (TME) to form a physical and biochemical barrier. Secondly, during progression of the disease, the body's immune system is hijacked to support the proliferation of the cancer. New approaches, such as immunotherapy, are therefore needed where it has already shown promise in overcoming many aspects of this resistance. Immunotherapy has the potential to treat minimal residual disease after pancreatic resection (surgery) as well as for metastatic and non-resectable PDAC. Our objective for this project
is to bring together a multidisciplinary and intersectoral group to develop novel vaccine approaches, including use of multiple immunomodulating components.
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Coordinator
80539 Munchen
Germany