Cancer Immunology
Theme leads: Jamie Blundell, Cambridge University & Rob Bristow, Manchester University
The Cancer Immunology theme aims to utilise the adaptive immune system as a means for early cancer detection by characterising immune signatures that associate with early cancer development. This will aim to lead to development of innovative immune-based tools for early cancer detection and potentially ultimately enabling personalized immunotherapy for interception or prevention. This will be achieved by integrating cutting-edge biobanking with genomic and tumour microenvironment annotation, advanced immunological assays, single cell multi-omics, and artificial intelligence.
The immune system is an exquisitely sensitive and highly specific in-built early cancer detection system. Recent studies have shown that tumour-specific immune responses are detectable in T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoires generated from peripheral blood at the time of cancer diagnosis raising the prospect that these signals could be used for early cancer detection. However, to determine whether immune repertoires could be utilised as a robust early detection biomarker several key scientific questions must be answered, including how we reliably distinguish the B- and T-cells crucial for tumour recognition from irrelevant bystanders, and whether and at what point during carcinogenesis can these cells be detected?
Theme goals