ABSTRACT
Support is requested for a Keystone Symposia conference entitled Cancer Neoantigens, Vaccines and
Viruses, organized by Drs. Catherine J. Wu, Robert D. Schreiber and Cornelis J.M. Melief. The conference will
be held in Vancouver, BC Canada from June 27- July 1, 2021.
Advances in cancer immunotherapy are rapidly transforming the treatment landscape across cancers, but a
critical challenge in the field is understanding how we can better drive T cells into tumors, and hence make
them available for mounting productive anti-tumor responses. The fields of viral and cancer immunity share
many parallels, and insights learned from each area can expand our collective knowledge of how to address
this challenge. Cancer vaccines are a valuable immunotherapeutic modality, capable of expanding the
repertoire of tumor-specific T cells and have the potential to be productively combined with complementary
therapeutic approaches. This conference program was designed to highlight the exciting recent clinical and
scientific advances, including the identification of novel antigen targets, new understanding of how the tumor
microenvironment is immunoregulated and modulated by cancer immunotherapies, and the development of
novel therapeutic approaches. Together, the collective shared knowledge gained from interdisciplinary
interactions from this meeting promise to open the path for consideration of novel approaches for the design of
more effective cancer immunotherapies.