New therapies that promote antitumor immunity have been recently developed. Most of these immunomodulatory approaches have focused on enhancing T-cell responses. Although these therapies have led to unprecedented successes, only a minority of cancer patients benefit from them, highlighting the need to identify new cells and molecules that could be exploited in the next generation of immunotherapy. Given the crucial role of innate immune responses in immunity, harnessing these responses opens up new possibilities for long-lasting, multilayered tumor control. We will present innovative anti-tumor therapies based on the manipulation of the innate immune system. In addition, given the urgent need for effective treatments for pneumonia in patients with COVID-19, the elucidation of the immune responses that occur during the course of COVID-19 could lead to the repurposing of approved immunomodulatory drugs and candidate drugs that have already been tested in clinical trials. Along this line, we will present our results indicating the association of COVID-19 inflammation with activation of the C5a–C5aR1 axis.

PRESENTER

Éric Vivier, DVM, PhD completed his post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School, then joined Aix-Marseille University as professor at the Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML) in 1993 before becoming its director from 2008 to 2017. He is Professor of Immunology at Aix-Marseille University and at the Public Hospital of Marseille (AP-HM) in addition to being Scientific Director of Innate Pharma, a biotechnology company dedicated to improving cancer treatment with innovative therapeutic antibodies that exploit the immune system. Eric Vivier’s work focuses on innate immunity and in particular Natural killer and other innate lymphoid cells, at Ciml, at AP-HM and at Innate-Pharma.

MODERATOR

Miriam Merad, M.D.; Ph.D. is the Mount Sinai Chair professor in Cancer Immunology and the Director of the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Dr. Merad also co-Directs, the Cancer Immunology program at The Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Institute and is the Director of the Mount Sinai Human Immune Monitoring Center (HIMC).

Miriam Merad is the Vice-President of IUIS.