Immunotherapy turns the body’s own immune system against cancer. It can be strikingly effective, but it has limits, and a LUMC team wants to push past them by combining two approaches that each engage the immune system in a different way: TCR T-cell therapy, a cellular immunotherapy, paired with antibody therapy. The idea is to activate a large part of the immune system at once and see whether the combination works better and more precisely than either treatment alone. New funding lets the team test whether the approach is feasible and effective, and what happens when cellular therapy meets broad immune activation, knowledge that could shape future cancer treatments. Cilia Pothast is pictured with the project.
A second grant, €947,000 from ZonMw, goes to the INSPIRE consortium led by LUMC surgeon dr. Volkert Huurman with dr. Jeroen de Jonge (Erasmus MC) and prof. Vincent de Meijer (UMCG). The team is comparing two ways of preparing a donor liver for transplant. In normothermic regional perfusion, warm, oxygen-rich blood flow is restored to the liver straight after donation. In ex-situ perfusion, that happens outside the body, in a dedicated machine, just before the transplant.
The aim is to find out which method works best, in the hope that more donor livers become usable and patients recover better. The researchers are also tracking the effects on other organs and the consequences for cost, capacity, and the environment. Because Dutch hospitals work closely within a single transplant network, the study is well suited to being run here, adding knowledge that can improve care for future patients.
