Antoni van Leeuwenhoek has been awarded with grant of 4.1 million eur
“Incredibly proud of my team at het AVL NKI for all the work we did together to get the trust of KWF to be awarded with this extraordinary grant of 4.1 million eur. We will test in an international study whether chemotherapy can be safely omitted in patients with a stage I TNBC with high level of immune cells. Thanks to KWF, BOOG, EORTC, BVN for all the help and support!”
Quoting
“Thanks to our donors, we can spend 4.1 million euros on a large international study into the omission of chemotherapy in breast cancer. The OPTImaL study focuses on women with early-stage triple-negative breast cancer and many immune cells in and around the tumor. Their prognosis is so good that chemotherapy is unlikely to be necessary.
Project leader Marleen Kok of the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek will investigate whether the number of immune cells is a reliable indicator of the need for chemotherapy.
The outcome could save thousands of women worldwide from chemotherapy treatment – and with it, a lot of suffering. Dorine Manson, Chairman of the Board of KWF. ‘The research fits in very well with the goals we have as KWF, namely better treatments and better quality of life for patients during and after the treatments. We’re going to follow it with great interest.’
Read more about it here.”
Video attached to the post.
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Marleen Kok is a medical oncologist and associate professor in translational cancer research at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI), Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she leads the breast cancer immunotherapy program and a translational breast cancer immunology laboratory. She is working at the forefront of innovative immunotherapy trials. The mission of her clinical and translational team is to improve immunomodulatory treatments for breast cancer patients. She is the recipient of The 2023 Victoria’s Secret Global Fund for Women’s Cancers Rising Innovator Grant to investigate cancer-immune interactions in-depth in patients with TNBC in the context of anti-PD1 treatment. .