Dr Amrik Basran, Chief Scientific Officer at Avacta, explains the current state of cancer immunotherapy and the challenges of moving into combinations of these innovative treatments.
What is the current landscape like for cancer immunotherapy?
With the success of the monotherapy checkpoint inhibitors, researchers are starting to look at combinations of immunotherapies, and also at combinations of chemotherapy and immune checkpoint blockade.
Depending on which combinations and when they’re administered, these can have increased benefits for the patient in a wide range of cancers compared to monotherapy, mainly because you’re hitting two different mechanisms to get a broader effect.
Avacta Group Plc (LON:AVCT) offers reagents and therapeutics based on Affimer technology for diagnostic and research applications in the United Kingdom. The company’s custom Affimer products are also used in drugs and biomarkers discovery in biotech research and development.