Looking to gain time

NIBIT FOUNDATION

Identifying innovative strategies against cancer

It is the last frontier of the fight against cancer, one of the four strategies available today to treat tumors alongside surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Immunotherapy works by using drugs that activate our immune system, enabling it to destroy or keep under control the spread of cancer cells. In Siena operates one of the world's leading experts in this type of treatment, Dr. Michele Maio, Director of Medical Oncology and Immunotherapy Department of the University Hospital of Siena and president of NIBIT Foundation (Italian Network for Cancer Biotherapy). Alessia Covre is one of the young researchers of Maio’s team, working in the Tuscany Life Sciences Foundation laboratories, where NIBIT plays clinical and pre-clinical research in oncology and biomedical sectors. Enthusiasm, resolutions, the perception of contributing to a major challenge: Alessia Covre speaks about that in this interview, where he tells of NIBIT Foundation goals and gives details of sponsored projects. Among the clinical studies sponsored by NIBIT Foundation there are two revolutionary projects in international immuno-oncology: the study NIBIT-M4, supported in part by the AIRC, developed to study the combination of an immunotherapeutic drug with an epigenetic drug in the treatment of metastatic melanoma. The second study, NIBIT Meso-1 for the treatment of mesothelioma, associates two immunomodulatory antibodies that, in a different way, send activating signals to the immune system cells to make it more reactive against the tumor. The vanguard in the fight against cancer continues to pass through Siena.