Targeting chemokine receptors: An innovative strategy to reprogram cold to hot tumor microenvironment and to improve PD-1-based cancer immunotherapy

Cancer immunotherapy and notably immune checkpoint blockades (ICB) have emerged as promising treatment approaches for several advanced highly aggressive cancers for which conventional therapies have failed.However, recent clinical observations demonstrated that relatively few patients benefit from significant clinical remissions and suggested that durable clinical response to immune checkpoint inhibitors is dependent on the infiltration of cytotoxic immune cells into the tumor bed. Therefore, the next challenge in the field of ICB-based cancer immunotherapies is the development of strategies, to be combined with ICB, in order to promote immune cells recruitment and infiltration. The aim of this project is to evaluate the potential of targeting chemokine receptors in order to induce inflammatory signature in the tumor microenvironment and thereby enhance cytotoxic immune cells recruitment into the tumor bed.