Day 1 of the 2021 ESMO Annual Meeting was replete with several exciting presentations and expert viewpoints on the topic of investigational immunotherapies. Here is a summary of a few interesting talks.

Although checkpoint inhibitor therapies have been successful in some types of cancer, they require tumors to express high levels of checkpoint proteins and a preexisting T-cell response that can be reactivated to have significant clinical activity.

Unfortunately, many solid tumors do not meet these requirements. In order to induce a T-cell response against solid tumors, a team at The University of Chicago Medical Centre, funded by Gritstone bio, developed a personalized vaccine against tumor neoantigens, the proteins recognized by the immune system developed only in tumors.