Cornelius Melief received the European Society for Medical Oncology 2018 ESMO Immuno-Oncology Award in recognition of his life’s work in studying the interactions of the immune system with cancer.
The distinction will be officially presented to him at the opening keynote and award lecture of this year’s ESMO Immuno-Oncology Congress in Geneva in December.
“Professor Melief dedicated his career to understanding how the immune system, specifically cytotoxic lymphocytes, interact with cancer, and used this knowledge for the development of new therapeutic cancer vaccine strategies,” said George Coukos, a scientific co-chair of the upcoming congress
After studying virally induced cancer in mice, he is currently involved in clinical trials with synthetic vaccines for the treatment of head and neck as well as cervical cancer associated with the human papilloma virus.
Melief’s work in developing effective immunotherapy for virus induced tumours recently led to the implementation of clinical trials to bring so-called synthetic long peptide vaccines to cancer patients worldwide.
Melief and his team were able to show the clinical effectiveness of these vaccines in treating patients with pre-malignant lesions caused by HPV type 16. They also demonstrated that in patients with cancer, in whom vaccination could not be used effectively on its own and instead should be employed in combination with other therapies.
Among the most promising results obtained to date, Melief and his team found that a combination of SLP vaccination and standard chemotherapy strengthened cervical cancer patients’ immune response and prolonged their survival.
They further discovered that a similar effect could be achieved among patients with HPV-related head and neck cancer by administering the vaccines in conjunction with immunotherapy in the form of immune system boosting monoclonal antibodies.
Melief will be the second recipient of the ESMO Immuno-Oncology Award, which was created in 2017 in commemoration of European cancer research and treatment pioneer Prof. Georges Mathé, a founding member of ESMO.
Melief is professor emeritus in tumor immunology at the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, as well as the co-founder and chief scientific officer of ISA Pharmaceuticals.
