ESTRO Immunotherapy 2024
ESTRO Immunotherapy 2024
The importance of the interactions of the host immune system in the tumour microenvironment with cancer cells and the ability of a new generation of therapeutics to manipulate these interactions and enhance anti-tumour immune response has led to the breakthrough immunotherapy with immune checkpoint inhibitors in recent years. However only the minority of cancers have clinically meaningful responses and even amongst cancers that initially respond to immunotherapy, most eventually develop resistance and progress. Immune therapies should therefore be considered in multimodal tumor therapy concepts, including radiotherapy (RT).
The latter plays an important role in cancer treatment and the importance of the immunomodulatory effects of RT is increasingly recognized along with the opportunity to potentially overcome tumour resistance to immunotherapy and enhance anti-tumour responses through a variety of mechanisms. In this course, we aim to describe the immune landscape of cancer and the evidence for the evolving role and synergistic mechanisms of combining immunotherapy with radiotherapy, including the optimal dose, fractionation, volume, and timing of radiation for effective immune stimulation.