The final day of the 2022 CRI-ENCI-AACR International Cancer Immunotherapy Conference (CICON22) wrapped up an amazing conference in New York City, the first in-person joint scientific conference since 2018. The past four days demonstrated how far the field of cancer immunotherapy has come as well as opportunities to take the field much farther still.
Cancer vaccines—and what CRI’s Founding Scientific and Medical Director Dr. Lloyd J. Old once called “the search for specificity”—have long been a goal of cancer immunotherapy. The first session on Day 4 revealed advances on a number of fronts, including improvements in the time required to design personalized vaccines for individual patients as well as promising results in the setting of early-stage cancer that could pave the way for improved strategies against established tumors.
CICON22‘s final session centered around novel spatial, temporal, and computational approaches that are enabling researchers to better mine and make sense of the wealth of data that can now be obtained through sophisticated sequencing technologies. Knowledge of these numerous factors can enrich our understanding of the forces at play within the tumor microenvironment, especially the nature of the interactions between cancer and immune cells.
To recap the highlights and what you need to know from Day 4 of CICON22, we spoke with the University of North Carolina’s Benjamin Vincent, MD, one of the co-developers of the Cancer Research Institute (CRI) iAtlas.
Dr. Benjamin Vincent is an assistant professor and part of the joint faculty in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.
CICON takes place next year from September 20-23, 2023, in Milan, Italy.