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Monoclonal antibodies in haemato-oncology

Published on May 31, 2020   45 min

Other Talks in the Series: The Immune System - Key Concepts and Questions

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0:00
I'm Professor Mark Cragg. I'm a Professor of Experimental Cancer Biology at the Center for Cancer Immunology in Southampton. And today, I'm going to talk about "Monoclonal Antibodies in Haemato- Oncology".
0:14
So as a brief introduction summary of what I'm going to talk about today, in essence, it's about the antibody revolution where we've come from. From a number of decades ago where we had very few antibodies in the treatment of medicine. I'm going to give you a case study in Rituximab, which is the first monoclonal antibody that's approved in haematology. And in fact in all oncology, then I'm going talk through some of the work that's been done looking at the mechanisms of action of monoclonal antibodies in human oncology and the mechanisms of resistance that we've now encountered. And then, talking about some of the strategies that we might use to try and overcome that resistance and that largely comes down to using monoclonal antibodies in various combinations. And then, I'll have a little speculation at the end in terms of the future and where we're going with some of these strategies.
1:02
So the antibody revolution really started in the late 1990's. In that decade really we'd got six approved monoclonal antibodies. Some of those were fully mouse monoclonals and therefore had a limited utility in humans, but now we've got as high as over 70 approved monoclonal antibodies that we use to treat human beings for various diseases. And the exciting thing is they're still more in clinical development, and soon to be approved. So we have hundreds of monoclonal antibodies in phase I and II trials and a similar number, probably in phase III trials that may get approved next year. So we're looking at probably getting to 100 in the next few years.