ALBA Project

Immunotherapy treatments for cancer have brought about an unprecedented therapeutic revolution. In just a few years, antibodies that block immunosuppressive factors, such as PD-1 or PD-L1, have become established as first-line treatments, and chimeric antigen receptor modified T cells ("CART") are already being used in the treatment of hematological tumors. However, after the initial great expectations, the limitations of these therapies have also become apparent: many patients do not respond and others are forced to abandon treatment because of unbearable side effects.

To increase the number of patients who can benefit from immunotherapy treatments, new strategies must be developed to enhance the immune system's ability to detect and destroy tumor cells. One of the most promising of these is vaccines against tumor antigens. After several decades of using vaccines directed against classical antigens, which have yielded poor results, neoantigen vaccines, derived from tumor mutations, are being developed in recent years. Although the results of these clinical trials show efficacy, these vaccines are very costly (in time and money) and are specific for each patient, which makes their clinical translation difficult. 

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