Imunology and cancer

Hepatitis C virus is a common cause of chronic liver disease, that may lead to cirrhosis, hepatocellular cancer and liver transplanation. The advent of highly efficacious direct-acting antivirals and their success in the treatment of hepatitis C virus infection, generated soon an optimism. Thus, the World Health Organization has adopted a global strategy of reducing the incidence of new hepatitis B and C virus infection by 90 % by 2030. However, it turned out, that this goal is not achievable by drug treatment alone without a vaccination, because of the high number of infected persons, low rate of screening and poor access to treatment in several countries, and even the cost of the therapy...

Heat shock proteins have been the focus of many experimental studies during the last few years in order to understand their biology and their imunologic features. We conducted pre-clinical experiments showing that gp96 purified from human melanoma lines can represent melanoma antigens and stimulate T cells known to recognize such antigens. Clinical studies of vaccination were then initiated by our group by using heat-shock protein gp96 purified from autologous tumor tissues in patients with melanoma and colorectal carcinoma...