ESMO Immuno-Oncology 2025 | Emerging strategies to modulate the liver microenvironment in metastases
Niels Halama, MD, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany, comments on the future directions in treating liver metastases. Two potential strategies include finding novel immune modulators that specifically target the liver microenvironment without negatively impacting the rest of the body, and using local ablation technologies to physically destroy liver lesions, potentially triggering immune activation. Novel technologies are driving microenvironment modulation, and ongoing clinical trials are investigating the effects of combining ablation with immune activation. This interview took place at 2025 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Immuno-Oncology Congress in London, UK.
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Transcript
Yeah, absolutely, so this is an excellent question, and of course, the obvious question for such a presentation is, so how does the future look and what’s the direction? So, the simple answer is that we see currently two avenues that are quite interesting. One avenue, of course, is, let’s say, the direction of finding novel immune modulators that come together in a specific way...
Yeah, absolutely, so this is an excellent question, and of course, the obvious question for such a presentation is, so how does the future look and what’s the direction? So, the simple answer is that we see currently two avenues that are quite interesting. One avenue, of course, is, let’s say, the direction of finding novel immune modulators that come together in a specific way. The problem here is that you have to find something that is specific in the liver microenvironment, but is not impacting negatively the rest of the body. And this is, of course, a challenge. But we see that there are some interesting molecules around that are in clinical testing, and we’ll see what the data brings there. But this clearly advances beyond our standard approaches with typically modifying T-cell activation, T-cell specificity, but moves into the realm of microenvironment modulation. And this is something that is also driven by novel technologies. And one thing that I wanted to point out here is that there are interesting aspects of attacking liver metastases with local ablation technologies. So, a physical destruction of the lesions in the liver can at least partially alleviate this problem, and then the question is, if we have a smart approach for then sort of triggering the immune activation when we have the ablation of the liver metastasis, does that change the playing field? There are some data that show, and there are also some really nice clinical trials ongoing that show that there might be an effect, but we still have to see that it’s ongoing.
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