The Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation in Norwalk, Connecticut, has announced that it will invest $15 million over the next three years to launch an immunotherapy initiative.

The initiative will focus on three areas — providing standardized immune testing to pre-selected patients most likely to benefit from specific immune treatments; identifying resistance mechanisms to current immunotherapeutic approaches; and rapidly accelerating promising combinations of immunotherapies for the treatment of myeloma. To launch the first phase of the initiative, MMRF will issue a request for applications to researchers worldwide working in cancer immunology and will bring those with the greatest promise together in collaborative Networks of Excellence focused on generating data and testing hypotheses.

Phase two of the initiative will focus on moving findings from phase one into the clinic. The long-term goals of the initiative include predicting responses to different types of immune agents, including antibody and cell-based therapies, and identifying novel combination immune therapies for clinical testing.

"Immunotherapy has transformed outcomes for patients with many kinds of cancers that previously had few effective options," said MMRF president and CEO Paul Giusti. "There is a significant opportunity to improve the efficacy of these immune agents and identify patients more likely to respond to specific immune approaches, and by applying our unique precision medicine model, we're confident we'll put the promise of a cure within reach."