A team led by Benoît Van den Eynde, director of UCLouvain’s de Duve Institute, together with his group at the University of Oxford, has discovered a mechanism by which carefully chosen and timed chemotherapy strengthens the body’s response to a therapeutic cancer vaccine.
In preclinical research using viral-vector vaccines based on tumour antigens identified at UCLouvain, the benefit appeared when chemotherapy and vaccine were given on the same day and disappeared when they were several days apart.
The study was published in Cancer Cell and still needs to be confirmed in clinical trials. The authors suggest combining chemotherapy, therapeutic vaccination and anti-PD-1 immunotherapy, adjusting the timing of each treatment. Immunotherapy currently works well for 30 to 40% of cancer patients.
