Improving immunotherapy in head and neck cancer

Immunotherapy represents a revolutionary approach to treat cancer, but many human cancers are resistant to immunotherapy, for reasons poorly understood.

This project will use immunoproteomics to identify molecular markers of tumour cell sensitivity and resistance to killing by cytotoxic T cell, the effectors of anti-tumour immunity.

The resulting data will provide new information about HNC that will help in the development of new immunotherapies and provide patient classification to enable personalised therapy.

Miriam will focus the study to identify signatures in HPV and non HPV using clinical samples from patients treated within the Head and Neck unit at the Royal Marsden Hospital, using an established, ethics-approved protocol (CHIMERA), which allows sample collection from patients undergoing radiotherapy treatment in our centre.  Together these approaches will generate fundamental insights on head & neck cancer immune signalling and improve patient treatment. ​