Eleventh international conference on progress in vaccination against cancer (PIVAC-11), 10–13 October 2011, Copenhagen, Denmark

Excerpt

The eleventh scientific conference progress in vaccination against cancer (PIVAC-11) was held 10–13 October in Copenhagen, Denmark. Currently, the success of cancer immunotherapy as treatment modality is improving and newly approved drugs and immunotherapies are showing encouraging clinical results. To be effective, cancer vaccination needs to stimulate powerful immune responses against specific targets as well as overcome the barriers that cancer cells use to protect themselves. Especially, new drugs (i.e. Ipilimumab) have demonstrated that targeting suppressive elements leads to highly improved clinical outcome. PIVAC-11 was characterized by much optimism and interesting new data on how to improve cancer vaccination were presented. Talks were given on aspects of combination therapies, genetic vaccinations, combinations of chemotherapy and immunotherapy and tumor immune escape mechanisms. …