The Advanced Therapies Unit

Within the field of immunotherapy, adoptive cell therapy, a type of advanced therapy that allows the cells of the patient's immune system to attack the cancer, is emerging strongly.

It involves the extraction and use of a patient's own immune system cells to treat their tumor in a personalized way.

Among the forms of adoptive cell therapy, perhaps the most widespread clinically today would be the use of TIL cells and CAR-T cells.

CAR-T cell treatment is a new immunotherapy strategy that combines two forms of advanced therapy: cell therapy and gene therapy. It consists of extracting T cells from the patient with cancer (autologous if they are the patient's own, or allogeneic if they are from a donor) and, in the laboratory, introducing genetic material that enables them to recognize the tumor again and to activate its destruction machinery. 

The Clínica Universidad de Navarra designs vaccines with the objective of delaying or stopping the progression of the cancer, reducing the tumor, preventing its reappearance, and eliminating possible cells that have not been eliminated with other treatments.

For its elaboration it can use the patient's own dendritic cells.

Dendritic cells are a type of immune cell that stimulates the immune response by presenting an antigen on its surface to the other cells.

The Clínica Universidad de Navarra is carrying out various treatment studies using immunotherapy based on dendritic cells in advanced neoplasms, such as metastatic colon cancer, breast cancer or glioblastoma multiforme, which consistently show that it is possible to achieve a specific immune reaction against the tumor.

This type of immunotherapy tries to regulate the action of the immune system.

This involves, among many other receptors and ligands, two proteins, PD-1 and CTLA-4, which are found in T-lymphocytes, and their mission is to prevent these cells from destroying other cells, such as cancer cells, thus acting as "brakes" on the control of the immune system. By inhibiting these molecules, the action of these "brakes" is eliminated and the body's defence action is stimulated. 

This line of research uses an innovative strategy to accelerate the testing of combinations of immunotherapy drugs in a selection of tumours such as pancreas, stomach, lung or breast. Through the imCORE programme, the aim is to promote laboratory research associated with these complex clinical studies.