Today is World Head and Neck Cancer Day. Professor Kevin Harrington is a specialist in head and neck cancer. He and his Targeted Therapy Team aim to develop new cancer therapies that selectively target cancer cells. They do this by assessing combinations of viral, drug, and immune therapies alongside treatments such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Professor Harrington's team recently showed that a combination of radiotherapy, a drug that inhibits DNA damage repair, and an immunotherapy is highly effective at suppressing tumour growth in head and neck cancer in mice. The combination activates natural killer (NK) cells – a type of white blood cell with the ability to kill cancer cells directly. Professor Harrington says, "The exciting thing is that we can design completely new ways to treat patients with head and neck cancers and other radiocurable diseases by combining completely novel targeted drug combination strategies, like this one. "We hope that our work will lead to further evaluation of this approach with other immune checkpoint models and, potentially, be included in part of the ongoing ADePT-DDR trial, which is evaluating ATR inhibitor and radiotherapy with or without immunotherapy in patients with head and neck cancer." #WorldHeadAndNeckCancerDay #HeadAndNeckCancer #HeadAndNeckCancerAwareness #HeadAndNeckCancerSucks #HeadAndNeckCancerDay #HeadAndNeckCancers #HeadAndNeckCancerResearch #CancerResearch