Assessing the prospects of various methods to model and modify the tumour microenvironment (TME)

• Examining the challenges and latest progress in:
  • Means of tumor infiltration (incl. the burgeoning promise of nanotechnologies).
  • Understanding the role of and recruiting other immune cells in the TME.
• Why do I-O patients relapse? How the immune system and cancer biology interact.
• What role does the individual microbiome play?
• Bispecifics vs. CAR T cell therapy: prospects of success in the solid tumor arena.

How to increase their efficiency, flexibility and productivity in line with expected future trends in supply and demand

• Increasing the productivity of tomorrow’s manufacturing facilities.
• Next steps on the path to continuous manufacture of I-O therapeutics.
• Flexibility: as the diversity of the I-O portfolio increases, how to develop bioprocess and manufacturing strategies that enable the production of different therapeutics.

Where is real progress being made in understanding why patients do and don’t respond to I-O therapeutics?

• How enhanced understanding of the mechanisms of the immune system, tumor resistance, and I-O agents can improve targeting of patients.
• Latest analytical methods and assays - how to drive standardization?
• The future of personalized medicine/precision I-O in clinical routine.

What is going wrong between preclinical in vitro/in vivo and clinical in vivo settings?

• Preclinical/clinical treatment response prediction: which model systems can predict patient response to investigational molecules in practice?
• Combination therapy development – which preclinical models and strategies can deliver insights into the prospects of given combinations, plus optimal timeframes and sequencing?
• Comparing and contrasting the performance of various animal models in different tumor types.
• Utility of patient-derived cellular model systems for preclinical compound efficacy testing.
• Establishing a feedback loop: what lessons can we draw from negative outcomes from preclinical studies in the I-O space?

I-O discovery and development as driven by advances in bioinformatics and other technological innovation

• How next generation sequencing (NGS) tools and technologies can improve knowledge of the underlying biology of I-O.
• Single cell sequencing/analysis (e.g., transcriptomics, single cell RNAseq)
• Exome sequencing.
• High-plex/multiplex tools allowing spatial correlation (e.g., immunofluorescence).
• Machine learning and big data analytics platforms for the integration and predictive leveraging of multiple data sets.
• Synthetic biology and proteomics tools.
• Non-invasive monitoring technologies (imaging).

How next-gen biopharma manufacturing solutions will drive improvements in process and product robustness

• Benefits that emerging analytical tools can bring to antibody therapeutic biorocessing.
• Latest innovations in cell line development and purification for novel, complex antibody molecules.
• How single-use technologies are redefining the biopharma manufacturing model.
• Addressing scaling issues (e.g., how to avoid creating issues downstream as you scale-up upstream bioprocessing).