A closer look at immunotherapy for breast cancer

07-09-2017

The American Breast Cancer Research Foundation has included oncologist Marleen Kok from the Netherlands Cancer Institute in her researchers gallery. She is currently one of three Dutch scientists honored like this. In an international research collaboration she studies immunotherapy for breast cancer. This weekend at the European cancer conference ESMO she will present the first results of an innovative immunotherapy trial in breast cancer patients conducted at the Netherlands Cancer Institute.

Immunotherapy for breast cancer is still in its infancy. Researchers from two European and two American institutes are therefore studying which patients could benefit from this form of treatment and why others don't respond. Earlier this year, the American Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) gave $136.000 to this collaborative effort. "For a long time it was assumed that there was little interaction between breast cancer cells and the immune system", says medical oncologist Marleen Kok of the Netherlands Cancer Institute. She is the principle investigator of this international project, to which Netherlands Cancer Institute's researchers Ton Schumacher and Pia Kvistborg will contribute as well. "However, research has recently shown that a small group of roughly 5 to 20 per cent of breast cancer patients with metastases do benefit from immunotherapy."

 

A Closer Look At Immunotherapy For Breast Cancer

Low dose
The Netherlands Cancer Institute's contribution to the international project will be a very important one. "Thanks to Ton Schumacher's work we have developed unique techniques that allow us to monitor whether a patient has immune cells that can recognize cancer cells", says Kok. The other participants of the project are the American MD Anderson Cancer Center and Yale University, and the Jules Bordet Institute in Brussels.
The Netherlands Cancer Institute currently runs a clinical trial studying the effect of immunotherapy in patients with metastatic breast cancer. This weekend at the annual ESMO conference Kok will present the first results of this so-called TONIC-study, which has already included over 60 patients. "The special thing about our strategy is that we start treatment with a short period of 'immune induction' with either low dose chemotherapy or radiation before we start immunotherapy with nivolumab", says Kok. "We investigate whether this works better than immunotherapy alone."

Leading scientists
Kok's picture will soon be added to the online gallery of leading, BRCF-funded scientists. Next to Laura van t Veer and Titia de Lange - who are currently living in the United States - she is the third Dutch person in this list. Kok: "The Foundation and does important work by bringing international researchers together and making them work as a group." Kok already knows the American research world from the inside: for 9 months she worked as a postdoc at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, at the cancer immunology research department.

 

Breast cancer Marleen Kok group

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