Cancer Research - Europa

Treatment
Two major problems when treating cancer patients are the enormous complexity of the disease (and
side-eff ects such as cachexia) and small therapeutic window when using classical cytotoxic drug
regimens, resulting in serious toxicity and a strong reduction in the quality of a patient’s life.
Depending on the particular type of cancer from which a patient is suff ering, the standard treatments,
comprise classical treatment such as surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and combinations thereof.
Innovative, so-called targeted therapies that aim specifi cally at cancer or the host’s stroma cells and
the processes involved in their survival and metastasis to other parts of the body are urgently needed
since most cancers – unfortunately – fi nd ways to resist the often aspecifi c treatment conditions and
eventually kill the patient. For several cancers it has been convincingly demonstrated that patient survival
rates under such conditions can hardly be improved if at all.
The 29 projects in this section address novel means of hitting cancer cells through collaborative
research on new delivery and viral technology; by harnessing and optimising anti-cancer responses of
the innate and adaptive immune system through the development of specifi c antibodies and vaccines
that induce cell death or suppress critical signal transduction pathways that cancer cells need for survival
and expansion, as demonstrated for the fi rst time by Gleevec in chronic myeloid leukemia; by dissecting
molecular mechanisms in cancer cells that allow resistance to chemotherapy; by developing imaging
probes and devices that allow routine visualisation of selective drugs hitting their targets in a clinical
setting; by developing treatment biomarkers based on gene expression profi les, diff erential cellular
or molecular information obtained from diff erent sources and by diff erent technologies; and fi nally,
by clinically validating personalised medicine approaches based on large patient cohorts.
Jan van de Loo