This September month, Institut Curie, the Princess Máxima Center for pediatric oncology and Hopp Children’s Cancer Center Heidelberg (KiTZ) announce the launch of the European THEODORA project to accelerate the development and clinical evaluation of new immunotherapies against Ewing sarcoma, an aggressive cancer that mainly affects adolescents and young adults.
Funded with €13.2 million by Horizon Europe Mission Cancer and Fight Kids Cancer, this groundbreaking program coordinated by Institut Curie brings together key players in European pediatric research: the Princess Máxima Center for pediatric oncology (the Netherlands), Hopp Children’s Cancer Center Heidelberg (Germany), Gustave Roussy, Ghent University Hospital and Ghent University (Belgium) and Childhood Cancer International – Europe (CCI-E). (kan je instituten hyperlinken naar hun webpage ?)
“We are honored to be invited to contribute to this high-profile project initiated by Institut Curie. My team at Ghent University Hospital, Belgium in close collaboration with the Ghent Research Group on Nanomedicines (https://nanomedicinecentre.com/), who developed the vaccine formulation, specializes in the production of cancer vaccines for clinical studies. I believe that the selection of the cancer targets to include in the vaccine is key to success. The team at Curie did an amazing job using innovative approaches to identify targets that are expressed by the tumor and only by the tumor. In addition, these targets are expressed by most patients. This allows for the design of a standard vaccine that may be effective in all Ewing Sarcoma patients and should not cause severe adverse reactions” states Dr Bart Vandekerckhove, head of CellGENTherapies at Ghent University Hospital.
