What if there was a menu, a system, an algorithm that works for cancer. A predictable analysis to tailor treatment to personal fitness, tumor marks and physical endurance. A code that suits every patient and fits the way they want to walk the line of their disease, and their line of life.

We believe there is one – it could save many lives, and even more life disruptions. And we are close. We just need to map tumor type against immune system response, to crack the code. This new approach in cancer immunotherapy is called color coding, based on the danger model, with the ultimate goal of individual therapy for everyone.

It is our mission to reduce cancer to a treatable disease; a short life event, at early stage, to increase overall survival and life reintegration of patients, versus life-disrupting therapies.

Our research has learned that cancer immunotherapy works best when given in early stages of the disease, and even better when given for a six to nine week period upfront surgery (neo-adjuvant).

We have already shown that personalisation of neo-adjuvant immunotherapy, based on complex gene analyses, allows to accommodate the scheme of cancer therapy and surgery to individual patient needs.

Our new project now aims to characterise the patient‘s autoimmune status, by high-volume chip analysis with 22.000 proteins!
By this way we hope to predict the chance on toxic side effects from immunotherapy, even before starting treatment. By mapping the characteristics of 100 patients treated with neo-adjuvant immunotherapy to their individual outcomes and the individual toxicity they experienced, we plan to crack the code for future treatments.

Balancing the chance for autoimmune reactions (high/low) with tumor inflammation (hot/cold) along a simple color scheme, actually a heatmap, will indicate a menu for treatment. This way, we are basically color coding the individual patient’s cancer.

If successful, the research outcome will allow us to better advice patients their therapy to go for. This 360-degree characterization of individual patients' immune response and toxicity will bring us at the frontline of medicine; personal cancer therapy along the color coding of individual patient’s tumor/immune system. We believe that this approach will bring personal cancer therapy to a next level – besides saving lives, it is also saving survivors from a disrupted life.