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This lecture is about cancer vaccines.
And I'm Cornelis Melief,
Emeritus Professor at Leiden
University Medical Center
and Chief Scientific
Officer at ISA Pharmaceuticals.
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This slide shows the major hallmarks
of cancer
published in the journal Cell in the year 2000.
And amazingly enough, of
all the properties here
of cancer cells, such as sustaining
proliferative signaling, evading
growth repressors, activating
invasion and metastasis, et cetera,
there is no mention at all
of the immune response against cancer cells.
Whereas we now know that this is
a major interaction taking
place between cancer cells
and the immune system.
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Fortunately, Hanahan and Weinberg
realized this and revisited
the hallmarks of cancer yet
again in a publication in Cell
in the year 2011.
And now at the right-hand
side of this slide,
you see emerging
hallmarks, enabling
characteristics, two of which
deal with the immune system.
So in order for cancer
to be successful,
it has to avoid immune destruction.
On the other hand, the other side
of the coin of the immune system
is that certain types of
immunity, such as inflammation
of a particular type, for example,
that promoted by interleukin-6,
can promote tumor growth rather than
kill tumor cells, whereas avoiding
immune destruction means that
there are types of immune response
that we will return to that
can actually kill tumor
cells, such as cytotoxic T cells
and interferon gamma-producing T cells, in general.