ESMO Immuno-Oncology 2025 | Beyond T cells: emerging immune cell therapies in cancer

So what I’m about to do is to actually give an overview, as I’m the chair of the session, to give an overview of the different approaches that are being pursued outside of the T-cell realm, which is already mainstream in oncology these days, targeting T-cells, via different means, either directly with antibodies, by specific antibodies, or outside of the body of the patient by engineering it for certain specificity. And so what I will be doing is to structure this by different cell types that I felt were of interest. I mean, of course, for the interest of time, you can’t go through everything that is conceivable or is being done across the world. So, I mean, I will be talking about NK cells, iNKT cells. I will be talking about different types of myeloid cells, macrophages. I will be also talking about the more innate arm of the immune system, like gamma delta T cells. And for each of these different cell types, I will structure this further by modality. So meaning, okay, so each of these cells can be engineered on their own right. So you can isolate these from the patient and introduce whatever receptor, whatever thing you think could be useful, you can recruit these cell types to cancer cells or target multiple pathways on these cells to make them more active. You can do similar things, actually, with monoclonal antibodies that would just target a particular vulnerability of the cell type, which is dampening the function. And what you can also do, that’s actually more true for the, especially for the myeloid compartment, is that you can actually use pattern recognition receptor agonists, meaning like mimics of viral or even bacterial infection or danger signals to trigger ultimately a type I immune response in either immune cells or also cancer cells, thereby inducing the specific arm of immunity against cancer.

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