Steven Fiering

The immune system recognizes cancers and many are eliminated before they are clinically recognized. Cancer can be considered to be a failure of the immune system and it is now becoming clear that this immune failure is often due to active immunosuppression generated by the tumor.  One approach to cancer therapy is finding ways to stimulate the immune system to seek out and destroy tumor cells much like it seeks out and destroys infectious organisms.  Our lab is currently focused on developing novel approaches to boosting anti-tumor immunity by injection of immune stimulatory reagents directly into recognized tumors, an approach termed “in situ vaccination”.  The goal is to overcome the local immunosuppression, get an effective local antitumor immune response and generate a systemic antitumor immune response to fight metastatic disease. All vaccines include an antigen to be recognized by the immune system and an adjuvant to stimulate the response against the antigen.  For in situ vaccination the tumor carries all relevant antigens and injection of adjuvant into the tumor supports recognition of both tumor-associated and neoantigens expressed by the tumor. There are many options to how in situ vaccination can be performed and we explore the options in mice as well as working with dogs with spontaneous tumors and studying the local and systemic immune response involved.  The goal is to develop clinically useful in situ vaccination approaches.