INTEGRAL - IMMUNOTHERAPY

Immunotherapy, incl. vaccines, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells and checkpoint blockers, have produced extraordinary clinical results in subsets of cancer patients. Nonetheless, a number of patients do not benefit from immunotherapy, highlighting the need for strategies to improve its outcome. The INTEGRAL platform (“Integrating a multimodal approach to address current challenges in immunotherapy”) combines a complementary offering of expertise, know-how, knowledge and technologies originating from the VUB MITH, BCIM and TORC laboratories, to address this issue by offering tools for combining immune activation (ACTIVATION) with negating immunosuppressive cues (MODULATION), steering drug development (cellular and molecular MODE OF ACTION analysis) and driving patient selection and monitoring of therapy response (via in vivo IMAGING). 

The multidisciplinary INTEGRAL platform

The teams of Tony Lahoutte and Nick Devoogdt withing the Molecular Imaging and Therapy (MITH) research group combine an affiliation to the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, with a clinical link to UZ Brussel. The teams of Jo Van Ginderachter and Damya Laoui within the Brussels Center for Immunology (BCIM) are affiliated to the Faculty of Sciences and Bio-engineering Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, as well as to the Inflammation Research Center within VIB, a Flanders-based life science research center of excellence. Karine Breckpot’s team within the Translational Oncology Research Center (TORC) is based at the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. 

All three groups have a history of valorization-oriented Strategic Basic Research projects, contract research for biotech and pharma companies, fruitful joint research projects and spin-off creation. Thereby molecular imaging and therapy based on single-domain antibody fragments has grown to be an important underlying tool, recently supplemented with applications of cell therapies.