ESMO 2026 | Learning from early trials of cellular and vaccine-based immunotherapies
Sebastian Kobold, MD, PhD, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany, highlights the importance of carefully evaluating early clinical trials assessing cellular and vaccine-based immunotherapies to identify signals of efficacy or resistance and understanding the underlying mechanisms. Dr Kobold emphasizes the need to tailor treatment to specific patient populations based on their unique signatures, either including those likely to respond or excluding those with a low chance of response, in order to implement personalized treatments such as vaccines or cell-based therapies in a cost-effective manner. This interview took place at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2026 Congress in Madrid, Spain.
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Transcript
I think, and that’s clearly where we need to move now, is to really look very carefully in these early clinical trials, right, Phase One, Phase Two. Look where do we have signals, either for efficacy or for resistance, and try to the best we can to understand these. And based on this consideration, restrain the target patient population towards those that either have the signatures that would really make them nice responders based on the mechanism, or the opposite, to exclude those patients who had a very low chance of responding...
I think, and that’s clearly where we need to move now, is to really look very carefully in these early clinical trials, right, Phase One, Phase Two. Look where do we have signals, either for efficacy or for resistance, and try to the best we can to understand these. And based on this consideration, restrain the target patient population towards those that either have the signatures that would really make them nice responders based on the mechanism, or the opposite, to exclude those patients who had a very low chance of responding. And I think if we manage to do this, then we can really implement even these very advanced, very personalized types of treatments such as personalized vaccines or also cell-based therapies in a treatment algorithm that eventually would be a much better balance between the cost-to-benefit ratio than the approaches that we currently have, which are very often all-in-one strategies.
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