Since receiving funding from the H2020 grant in January 2017 from the European Union, the ImmunoSABR clinical trial has made steady progress. As of August 14, eight patients have been successfully enrolled in the ImmunoSABR clinical trial across three centres in Amsterdam, Maastricht and Leuven.

This project works to ensure that the clinical research teams are updated with the latest Good Clinical Practice (GCP) guidelines and that appropriate study and data management structures are in place. Clinical trials are conducted in accordance with the EU Clinical Trials Directive (Directive 2001/20/EC of 4 April 2001). To ensure all medical staff are up to date with this training an e-learning module has been developed and shared across all clinical trial centres.

Despite positive and progressive results of clinical trials in phase I, SABR in combination with immunotherapy still has a long way to go to be implemented into regular treatment.

 

About the project

ImmunoSABR combines two treatment strategies: stereotactic radiotherapy (SABR) and immunotherapy. The main objective of ImmunoSABR is to provide clinical proof using a bi-modal treatment in limited metastatic non-small cell lung cancer patients. Non-Small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is an immunosensitive disease. Therefore, patients with limited metastatic NSCLC might be the first subgroup of patients to benefit from this novel approach to cancer therapy. Currently, palliative treatment is the standard of care for patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer.

SABR and immunotherapy are a “1+1=3” combination, by first providing, in several preclinical models a strong synergistic and complementary effect by exploiting the clinical detectable cancer lesions as an ‘in situ’ vaccine by SABR in order to enhance systemic anti-tumour immune responses to target synchronous micrometastases, and second boosting effective tumour-specific immunity for long term tumour control (the so-called “memory effect”).