Sunil Kumar Saini
Novel targets for cancer immunotherapy
Sunil Kumar Saini, assistant professor at the Department of Health Technology, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), has received a Fellowship from the Lundbeck Foundation totalling DKK 10 million.
This research grant, to be paid out over a period of five years, will enable Sunil Kumar Saini to establish his own research group at DTU, the overriding goal of which is the application of immunotherapy in the treatment of cancer.
Together with his team, Sunil Kumar Saini, age 39, seeks to develop new methods within immunotherapy for strengthening the body’s own immune system – T cells – so they can better recognize and attack cancer cells. This is basically what immunotherapy is all about.
T cells can recognize cancer cells via specific molecules called antigens, which are found on the surface of the cancer cells. And when these antigens are recognised, it serves as a signal to the T cells that the cancer cells are undesirable and should be destroyed as quickly as possible.
Sunil Kumar Saini and his colleagues hope to identify a new class of antigens that can serve as targets in connection with immunotherapy for cancer. His research is aimed at blood cancer, among others.
