Beginner’s Guide to Cancer Immunotherapy
Event date and time: 22 October 2024, 9:30 am to 12:30 pm
Who should attend:
This content is ideal for research nurses, clinical nurse specialists, pharmacists, and clinical trials coordinators. It may also interest other healthcare professionals wanting to improve their understanding of immunotherapy.
This course is ideal for anyone new to cancer immunotherapy and would like to understand how these treatments came about and how they work.
This course will introduce the science behind many forms of immunotherapy, including immune checkpoint inhibitors, treatment vaccines, and CAR T cells.
Overview
An introduction to immunotherapy: what it is, how it works, and who it’s given to.
During this half day course Dr Elaine Vickers – a leading independent educator on the science of new cancer treatments – will introduce the science behind modern cancer immunotherapies for solid tumours and haematological cancers.
The course begins with an introduction to the relationship between cancer and the immune system. This relationship evolves with time, and Elaine will describe how cancer cells evade and suppress white blood cells to stay alive.
She then explains how immune checkpoint inhibitors such as nivolumab and pembrolizumab hope to boost the cancer-fighting response from the person’s immune system. To do this, she’ll discuss some of the critical features of T lymphocytes and why they’re the focus of these treatments.
Finally, in the third session of the morning, Elaine will describe many other forms of immunotherapy given to cancer patients. These include treatment vaccines, oncolytic viruses, double-ended proteins called T cell engagers, TIL (tumour-infiltrating lymphocyte) therapy, and CAR T cells. She’ll explain briefly how they work and why they’re valuable treatments for some patients and not others.