BACKGROUND A set of standard clinical chemistry and hematology parameters are usually measured during clinical studies. The major outcome of these standard tests is to control that the drug investigated does not lead to pathophysiological changes in respective organs or blood. In some cases based on scientific rationale such tests may not be needed. In this paper we report on a standard set of ...

Recent data suggest that T-cell reactivity against tumor-specific neo-antigens may be central to the clinical efficacy of cancer immunotherapy. The development of personalized vaccines designed to boost T-cell reactivity against patient specific neo-antigens has been proposed largely on the basis of these findings. Work from several groups has demonstrated that novel tumor-specific antigens can...

Please cite this article in press as: Elliott RL Oncology (2010), doi:10.1016/j.suronc.2010.0 The concept of cancer immunotherapy is not new and investigators have tried to stimulate the immune system tofight cancer for over a hundred years. However, success has been limited, inconsistent and very disappointing, thus preventing cancer immunotherapy frombecoming amainstreammodality of cancer the...

The effect of cancer immunotherapies is on the immune system and not directly on the tumour. The kinetics of immunotherapy are characterised by a cellular immune response followed by potential changes in tumour burden or patient survival. To adequately investigate immunotherapies in clinical trials, a new development paradigm including reconsideration of established end points addressing this b...

Dendritic cells (DCs) are rare leukocytes that are uniquely potent in their recent application to therapeutic cancer vaccines. Isolated DCs loaded with tumour antigen ex vivo and administered as a cellular vaccine have been found to induce protective and therapeutic anti-tumour immunity. In the present report we describe the most common methods of culturing DCs and delivering tumour antigens an...

These are exciting times for the field of cancer immunotherapy. Although the clinical efficacy of monoclonal antibodies has been demonstrated since the early 1990s, the therapeutic profile of other immunotherapeutic approaches-especially vaccines-has not yet been formally clarified. However, the recent success of several immunotherapeutic regimens in cancer patients has boosted the development ...

Phase I oncology trials are designed to identify a safe dose with an acceptable toxicity profile. In traditional phase I dose-finding design, the dose is typically determined based on the probability of severe toxicity observed during the first treatment cycle. The recent development of molecularly targeted agents and cancer immunotherapies call for new innovations in phase I designs, because o...

Dendritic cells (DC) are important antigen-presenting cells (APC) that can prime naive T-cells and control lymphocyte-mediated adaptive immune responses with respect to magnitude, memory, and self-tolerance. Understanding the biology of these cells is central to the development of new generation immunotherapies for cancer and chronic infection. This chapter presents a brief overview of DC biolo...

The Janus-faced roles of macrophages in cancer imply both tumor-suppressive and -stimulating actions of these innate immune cells. Whereas the balance is toward tumor promotion in most epithelial cancers, we have recently shown that osteosarcoma metastasis seems to be inhibited by macrophages. Here we discuss the possible mechanism of this observation.