Collaboration funded by the European Union within the Horizon 2020 Framework Program for Research and Innovation
11.06.2015
The Institute for Translational Oncology at the Mainz University Medical Center (TRON) under the leadership of Professor Ugur Sahin started an innovative research project on personalized cancer immunotherapy. The newly established APERIM "Advanced bioinformatics platform for personalized cancer immunotherapy" consortium coordinated by Professor Zlatko Trajanoski of the Medical University of Innsbruck in Austria will collaborate on the practical implementation of immunotherapy and the development of a new treatment platform specifically for unique tumor mutations of individual patients. The collaboration of eight academic partners and three companies is made possible through funding by the European Union within the Horizon 2020 Framework Program "Personalizing Health and Care" totaling EUR 3 million over the course of three years. The APERIM consortium is one of the few successful ones with an overall success rate of only 6.9 percent for the given sub-call.
The immune system protects the human body not only against foreign pathogens, but also against tumor cells. Tumor cells can escape the control of the immune system in various ways. However, this reduced defensive reaction can be stimulated therapeutically, as has been demonstrated in numerous publications. These new findings, as well as new ways of obtaining more and more information from patient samples using a method known as Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), require the development of new platforms to manage and utilize the obtained data for patient treatment. Thus, treatment platforms can process the individual data of cancer patients to identify individually tailored therapy options. Advanced bioinformatics methods enable the evaluation and processing of specific information on the molecular fundamentals of individual tumors, which in turn forms the basis for a truly personalized cancer immunotherapy.
The APERIM project has four goals: A new database will store all molecular information on a tumor, a new analysis tool will permit quantification of tumor-infiltrating T cells, a software application will provide the information required to produce personalized therapeutic vaccinations, and a new method will be used to develop a specific T cell gene therapy. "This comprehensive information will then provide an important foundation for diagnosis and therapy," explained Professor Zlatko Trajanoski, the project coordinator.
TRON, the Institute for Translational Oncology at the Mainz University Medical Center, is a trans-disciplinary, non-profit research organization dedicated to innovation transfer for cancer immunotherapies at the interface of immunology, genomics, and bioinformatics. It is financially supported by the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Professor Ugur Sahin, founder and managing director of TRON, is a physician by training and translational researcher with long-standing expertise in managing projects in the public-private interface. A pioneer in cancer target discovery using high throughput immunological methods and bioinformatics approaches, Sahin holds more than 70 independent patent applications covering novel cancer biomarkers and targeted therapeutic platforms. His key focus is solving deeply rooted challenges in the multifaceted process of translating innovation from bench to bedside, an interest that was originally prompted by his experiences as a physician. Sahin's publications have more than 6,000 citations and he is the recipient of prestigious awards from the German Hemato-Oncology Association, the German Association for Immunology, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the American Society of Clinical Oncology.