To enhance research on current cancer therapies and search for new treatments, the National Cancer Center for Singapore have signed an MoU with biotechnology company immunoSCAPE.

Under this partnership, undertaking of joint R&D projects will be done, application of joint funding and exchange of scientific and technological information will be done in addition to improving immune-monitoring.

Both parties have said in a joint release that several projects in prostate, head and neck, lung and urogenital cancers are already in discussion.

Activating the patients’ immune response against cancer through immunotherapy strategies has yielded some early successes and promise in the fight against cancer, said a news reported by Channel News Asia.

The two organizations will jointly research on the immune response induced by various cancer treatments such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy.

One such collaborative project is to examine if radiotherapy triggers the patients’ immune responses to fight cancer, in addition to directly killing cancer cells. This finding is important as about half of the cancer cases in NCCS require radiotherapy, and it may pave the way to the successful combination of radiotherapy with immunotherapy.

Immunotherapy has more advantages over classical chemotherapy drugs in that it induces fewer side effects and offers potentially long-term protection against cancer. However, immunotherapy requires predictive biomarkers to identify which patients are likely to respond to it before it is administered.

Biotechnology company immunoSCAPE specializes in mapping immune system responses against tumour cells and pathogens, and measures changes in immune cells for biomarker and target identification. NCCS will tap on immunoSCAPE’s expertise to identify which biomarkers are relevant to predict the outcome in patients treated with new immunotherapies.