Advancing the field of cancer immunotherapy

It has been two years since clinical development of cancer immunotherapy has started to turn from decades of failures to its first successes in randomized Phase 3 trials with Sipuleucel-T, a dendritic cellbased vaccine, and ipilimumab, a monoclonal antibody targeting CTLA-4. Both are increasing patient survival in their target diseases. The path to these successes was, in part, paved by the methodological improvements regarding clinical endpoints for immunotherapy development that enabled the understanding of the clinical observations made for these agents and the differentiation of immunotherapy kinetics from chemotherapy kinetics. Such methodological improvements do not come easy and require broad consensus across the community that uses these methods for them to be widely applicable. The adaptation of immunotherapy clinical endpoints took about five years, and has shown that consensus work facilitated by community organizations like the Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium (CIC) or the Association for Cancer Immunotherapy (CIMT) can be impactful and systematically fill gaps that prevent advances in our field. Similarly, other methodological improvements are needed in this space and have been worked on by several community organizations for years. The first that comes to mind is the effort of harmonizing the use of immune monitoring assays in multi-center clinical trials through a data-driven, SOP-based process that enables individual centers to use their own Advancing the field of cancer immunotherapy MIATA consensus guidelines become available to improve data reporting and interpretation for T-cell immune monitoring