IMMUcan
Project Information:
- Full title: Integrated immunoprofiling of large adaptive cancer patients cohorts (IMMUcan)
- Duration: 65 months (1 March 2019 - 31 August 2024; extended to August 2025)
- Status: Ongoing
- Funding programme: Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 (IMI2; Grant Agreement 821558)
What will the project do?
- Some new cancer treatments harness the immune system to fight the disease. However, for most patients, they do not deliver a long-lasting response and they often cause unpleasant side effects. To address these challenges, IMMUcan aims to study the tumour microenvironment in a bid to gain a deeper understanding of how the immune system and cancer cells interact at the molecular level.
What are the expected outcomes?
- Using cutting-edge technologies, the team will analyse tumour tissue, blood, stool and saliva samples as well as clinical information from some 3 000 patients with colorectal, lung, head and neck, breast, gastric and renal cancers.
- By comparing patients who are not going through immune therapy with patients who are, the project hopes to build up a detailed picture of the tumour and its microenvironment, and the impact of current treatments. This information could be used to further improve existing treatments and to develop new ones.
- In the longer term, the project results could result in the identification of biological markers that will show which patients are most likely to respond well to immune therapies, and which patients would benefit from a combination of immune therapies and conventional treatments.
What is EPF's role?
- EPF is proud to take the lead of Work Package 2 together with EORTC, which is aimed at developing and implementing an effective dissemination and communication strategy for the project. We look forward to getting started and expect that the knowledge gathered from this project will be transferable.
Consortium:
- The consortium is led by EORTC and includes 19 other partners, including 10 expert clinical centers.
- Abbvie Inc, North Chicago, Illinois, United States
- Bayer Aktiengesellschaft, Leverkusen, Germany
- Eli Lilly And Company Limited, Basingstoke, United Kingdom
- Glaxosmithkline Research And Development LTD., Brentford, Middlesex, United Kingdom
- Institut De Recherche Pierre Fabresas, Toulouse, France
- Institut De Recherches Internationales Servier, Suresnes, France
- Janssen Pharmaceutica Nv, Beerse, Belgium
- Merck Kommanditgesellschaft Auf Aktien, Darmstadt, Germany
- Sanofi-Aventis Recherche & Developpement, Chilly Mazarin, France
- Centre De Lutte Contre Le Cancer Leon Berard, Lyon, France
- Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Lausanne, Switzerland
- Charite - Universitaetsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany
- De Duve Institute, Bruxelles, Belgium
- European Organisation For Research And Treatment Of Cancer Aisbl, Brussels, Belgium
- Fundacio Centre De Regulacio Genomica, Barcelona, Spain
- Institut Curie, Paris, France
- Institut Jules Bordet, Brussels, Belgium
- Institut National De La Sante Et De La Recherche Medicale, Paris, France
- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
- King's College London, London, United Kingdom
- Ligue Nationale Contre Le Cancer, Paris, France
- Luxembourg Institute Of Health, Luxembourg, Luxembourg
- SIB Institut Suisse De Bioinformatique, CH-660-0733998-3, Genève, Switzerland
- The University Of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom
- Universitat Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland
- Weizmann Institute Of Science, Rehovot, Israel
- Owkin France, Paris, France
- European Patients’ Forum (EPF), Brussels, Belgium
