Advanced immune monitoring for clinical trials

Extensive immune monitoring gives insight into the immune status of patients before/during (immune) therapy, which is required to decipher biological mechanisms and explore biomarkers of efficacy/adverse effects for personalized treatment design.

In recent years, many novel immune-modulating treatment strategies have emerged, including biologicals and cellular therapies. These have shown great potency (in combination or as stand-alone treatment) to improve efficacy and even survival chances (in malignancies) and reduce probability on adverse effects. The interplay of immunological mechanisms that are affected following immunotherapy and how the success or failure relates to the immune status of the often heavily pre-treated patients is largely unknown.

We aim to provide standardization and harmonization in sample logistics (sampling, transport, storage), monitoring assays, read-outs, and data processing to enable better comparison between multiple studies applying immune therapy, or therapies where the immune system is at play. Understanding the biology of immune therapies will give us tools to optimize the timing/dosing and may give us rational for certain combinations of these advanced therapeutics.

Within a specialized laboratory we provide an extensive and harmonized immune monitoring protocol to unravel the functional dynamics of the immune system in newly diagnosed patients and following the course of (immune) treatment strategies. This enables the development of precision therapies resulting in better efficacy of treatment and survival chances with minimal adverse effects.