CAG in Cancer Immunotheraphy (CAGci) will find out which cancer patients will benefit from immunotherapy, what to do with those who do not have the benefit of the treatment and how to predict side effects from the treatment. However, researchers need more knowledge about how the treatment affects the patients.
In an interview with the Oncology Journal, Inge Marie Svane talks about some of the questions that CAGci is trying to find answers to in the field of immunotherapy, but she points out that there is a great need to obtain the correct data in order to answer the many questions.
“The knowledge gained from the large trials from the pharmaceutical industry, primarily is that when you take a highly selected patient material, this is how many that have effects of the treatment. However, the patients, we deal with in reality, are not similar to the patients that participate in the clinical trials. It is actually less than half of the patients we treat, who could be included in the studies. In this context, we need to gain knowledge about the ‘real patients’, explains Inge Marie Svane.
CAGci is part of Greater Copenhagen Health Science Partners (GCHSP). Inge Marie Svane hopes that the GCHSP-collaboration will benefit the synergy between the hospitals and universities, to make research faster.
“Clinical researchers at the hospitals can tell the researchers at the universities, about the problems we face in the clinic, and then they can try to help us. Our hospitals have a lot of material from biobanks and databases, while the universities on the other hand have, for example technology and know-how. In the end, a closer collaboration may very much result in faster clinical outcomes as well as a faster implementation in the patient treatment”, says Inge Marie Svane.
CAGci was appointed CAG the 28 June 2018. The 27 August the CAG held its first CAG meeting. At the meeting they decided who among the CAG members that will lead the eight working groups in CAG. During the following months, the group leaders shall define what objectives they will achieve, and who they would like to include in their cross-disciplinary groups in order to achieve those objectives.
CAGci is headed by Professor Inge Marie Svane, director of Herlev Hospital Centre for Cancer Immune Therapy (CCIT) and Professor Niels Ødum from the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at the University of Copenhagen.
Read the entire interview with Inge Marie Swan in Oncology journal (in Danish)
