Personalized rapid ex vivo determination of immunotherapeutic cancer treatment (PREDICT)
Audun Kvalvaag aims to establish a fluorescence microscopy-based platform to test the efficacy of immunotherapy outside the patient's body in order to determine whether the therapy will work for a particular cancer patient. The project will build on some of the results recently published by Audun in a PNAS article .
Checkpoint immunotherapy has revolutionized cancer treatment and cancers that were previously considered terminal can now be cured with such therapies. However, many patients do not respond to the therapy and treating non-responders is both costly and potentially dangerous for the patients.
If successful, this project would enable clinicians to make informed decisions about which therapies have the highest probability of success for the individual patients and thus reduce costs and suffering.
Read about the SPARK programmed and other selected projects here .