Dr Alistair Cook has recently won a fellowship and grant for his research exploring the mechanisms behind radio-immunotherapy.

Radio-immunotherapy refers to the practice of combining radiotherapy and immunotherapy to kill cancer cells. On their own, radiotherapy and immunotherapy can still be effective – however, when used in tandem, radio-immunotherapy may be able to kill a wider range of cancers with a high rate of success. The process is still poorly understood, even though it has the potential to treat patients that do not respond well to chemotherapy.

Alistair’s work investigates the synergistic mechanisms behind the combination of radiation with immunotherapy to treat mesothelioma tumours. Irradiating tumours can modify the structure of abnormal blood vessels. Research performed by NCARD has found that this enables more immune cells to enter the tumour, which may increase the effectiveness of subsequent checkpoint blockade immunotherapy. So far, the combination looks promising – an NCARD trial using mice models resulted in a 100 percent cure rate after radio-immunotherapy treatment. Alistair has recently been awarded an iCare Dust Diseases Board fellowship to continue his research for the next three years.

In addition, Alistair received a grant from the Washington D.C.-based Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation for his project ‘Radiation-induced vascular remodelling to boost immunotherapy outcomes’.

Congratulations to Alistair for his achievement and thank you to the organisations supporting his valuable work. We hope that the research accomplished by Alistair and his colleagues over the next few years will yield good news for mesothelioma patients.