Seven IMMUcan abstracts selected for ESMO Immuno-Oncology Congress 2023

EORTC is very proud to inform you that seven IMMUcan abstracts have been selected for the ESMO Immuno-Oncology (ESMO-IO) Congress 2023 (6-8 December 2023, Geneva, Switzerland), an internationally renowned scientific event discussing the latest developments in the immuno-oncology field.

The IMMUcan project is an international public-private consortium of 30 partners running an integrated immuno-oncology profiling platform under the leadership of EORTC and Merck. The objective is to understand the interplay between cancer cells and the immune system and the impact of therapeutic interventions. To that end, high-quality human biological material and clinical data are being collected from up to 3,000 patients with colorectal, lung, head & neck, breast and gastric cancers. The broad molecular and cellular profiling data generated from various immunoprofiling techniques are integrated with the longitudinal clinical data and used for the discovery of novel biomarkers to further document our understanding of resistance mechanisms to immunotherapy. Clinical data and biological material are collected either via prospective recruitment of patients in the EORTC SPECTA platform or via collaborations with external organisations providing access to their clinical trials and cohorts. More information about IMMUcan can be found here.

Thanks to the commitment from the EORTC SPECTA network of investigators and patients, half of the patient recruitment target was reached in early May 2023 and data was cleaned for the first IMMUcan cohorts analysis. The first results will be presented during ESMO-IO 2023 highlighting the novel biomarkers identified in triple-negative breast cancer, the resistance mechanisms of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma patients treated with immunotherapies, as well as the integration of molecular and cellular modalities to gain an understanding of advanced non-small cell lung cancer.

The seven accepted abstracts are:

The timing and location of the poster presentations are available from the ESMO-IO website.

“IMMUcan is a cornerstone in the development of precision oncology. This challenging and complex project is only made possible by the excellence of the consortium supported by EORTC clinical research infrastructure and network.”

– Denis Lacombe, EORTC CEO

“IMMUcan is one of Europe’s largest tumour microenvironment-profiling efforts to date thanks to the fantastic collaborative work of the 30 academic and pharma partners and the EORTC clinical network. The scientific discoveries coming out of the generated data have the potential to change the clinical landscape, with identification of new biomarkers and rationale for more effective combination therapies.”

– Marie Morfouace and Henoch Hong, Merck Healthcare KGaA

IMMUcan receives funding from the European Union (grant 821558) within the Innovative Medicine Initiative 2 program and from the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries. The EORTC SPECTA platform is supported by Alliance Healthcare, a member of Cencora.