The breakthrough of immune checkpoint-targeting therapies has unleashed new hopes and successes for cancer therapy. However, subsets of patients remain who do not show robust responses to immunotherapy. To address this hurdle, combination therapies – coupling agents with distinct mechanisms of action (MoA) – appear promising to enhance treatment success against various cancers.
Choosing a preclinical model to profile new therapies is one of the main challenges in the field of immuno-oncology, as they are expected to predict a faithful translation into clinic, along with anticipating efficacy and tolerability of immunotherapies.
Immunocompetent models featuring humanized immune checkpoints enable the assessment of human-targeted therapies in well-established syngeneic tumor models, allowing investigation in a context of fully functional crosstalk between syngeneic tumor, immune and stroma cells. Importantly, while these models enable profiling evaluation of agents directed toward human targets, results still reflect mouse biology. Alternatively, immunodeficient mice reconstituted with a human immune system offer the possibility to investigate the efficacy and MoA of agents directed against human targets, with the advantage of exploring human biology using human tumor cells lines in a mouse model.
This webinar will demonstrate examples of applicability and complementarity of syngeneic and BRGSF-HIS (Human Immune System) models to assess efficacy and MoA of immunotherapies, either in combination with inhibitory immune checkpoints or as monotherapy.