ASCO Kickoff: Cancer Vaccines, Cell Therapies, and AI-Driven Precision Oncology Signal the Next Era of Immunotherapy

In this interview with Pharmacy Times, Karen Knudsen, PhD, MBA, CEO of Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), discusses major immunotherapy advances being presented at the 2026 ASCO Annual Meeting and their potential impact on cancer care. Knudsen highlights the growing momentum behind therapeutic cancer vaccines, particularly in difficult-to-treat malignancies such as metastatic melanoma, pancreatic cancer, and glioblastoma, as well as continued progress in cell-based therapies for solid tumors. She also emphasizes the expanding role of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), rational immunotherapy combinations, and AI-driven immune profiling platforms like PICI’s Radiohead initiative to better predict treatment response and toxicity.

Pharmacy Times: PICI is presenting research across a wide range of cancers and immunotherapy platforms at ASCO this year, from CAR T-cell therapies to neoantigen vaccines and immune profiling tools. Which advances do you believe are closest to meaningfully changing patient care in the near term, and why?

Karen Knudsen, PhD, MBA: We’re very excited about everything that’s going to be presented at ASCO, including our 50-plus abstracts from our PICI investigators across the country. When I look at ASCO 2026 in totality, I see a number of key themes emerging. One is moving beyond single breakthroughs and toward rational combination strategies, especially with immunotherapy continuing to come through strongly.

We are also seeing what I am very excited about, which is the promise associated with cancer vaccines. Therapeutic vaccines in difficult-to-treat cancers, such as metastatic melanoma and pancreatic cancer, continue to show promise, and I think those are the very first indications that this is going to dynamically change the way we treat cancer moving forward with the advent of therapeutic cancer vaccines.

We are also seeing cell-based therapies start to make additional gains again in those difficult-to-treat tumors, particularly metastatic solid tumors. Then, of course, we’re seeing ADCs, or antibody-drug conjugates, coming on strong. They will really change how we deliver therapeutic agents in the future.

Those are some of the things I’m very excited about, in addition to advances in early detection and the utilization of AI for health care delivery. Those get me out of bed too, but on the therapeutic side, those are really the major key points.

Pharmacy Times: Many of the therapies highlighted by PICI involve increasingly complex treatment regimens and toxicity profiles. From your perspective, how important is the role of oncology pharmacists and multidisciplinary care teams in helping safely implement next-generation immunotherapies in real-world practice?

Knudsen: I’d say this is more important than ever, and I’m so glad for meetings like ASCO because they allow everyone to get up to speed on not only what has been approved now, but also what we are likely to see gain approval over the next 12 months.

If we think even about areas like cell-based therapy, we’ve seen new innovations over the last few months in in vivo engineering. This reduces the dependency on situations where you need leukapheresis, modification of someone’s cells externally, and reinfusion with all of the associated risk and complexity. We know these therapies can be curative, but in vivo engineering technology is really starting to show promise, and that has been one of our major contributions as well through investigators here at the Parker Institute.

Once that happens, we will see a truly democratized ability for people to access cell-based therapies, where patients will not necessarily need to travel to a major cancer center to receive treatment. I think it will be very important for pharmacy and health care delivery practitioners to understand what is coming with something as complex as in vivo engineering.

The same is true with ADCs and immunotherapy combinations. At this ASCO, for example, we are seeing interesting combinations involving PARP inhibitors and checkpoint inhibitors. Biologically, this makes perfect sense, and the trial being presented at ASCO showed very interesting and promising results. The question now is how we translate those findings into the real-world setting and what complexities and toxicities might be associated with those strategies, because I think we are going to see many more of these types of combinations moving forward.

Pharmacy Times: PICI’s RADIOHEAD platform is exploring ways to predict immunotherapy response and toxicity using multimodal immune profiling. How could tools like these eventually help clinicians—including pharmacists managing supportive care and adverse events—deliver more personalized treatment strategies?

Knudsen: You touched on exactly what is unfolding in front of us, which is anticipating toxicities and developing personalized treatment strategies so that we can get the right therapy to every patient the first time around, rather than after difficulties arise.

We view investments in strategies like Radiohead as helping to solve that goal. What Radiohead really is is a very large data set that allows us to conduct multimodal immune profiling and then layer on AI-driven computational oncology technologies to evaluate outcomes such as the ability to predict immunotherapy response and toxicity, all toward the goal of improving patient selection.

Radiohead is something that has benefited from a multitude of different resources within the Parker Institute, centralized to build a large data set capable of answering those important questions in partnership with investigators across the field. We continue to interrogate data associated with Radiohead, and some of those findings will be presented at ASCO. Those data allow us to make informed, evidence-driven hypotheses about how to move precision medicine forward in immuno-oncology.

Pharmacy Times: PICI’s recent partnership with CVC and continued investment in cancer vaccine development signals growing momentum in the space. What excites you most about where cancer vaccines are headed, and what milestones should clinicians and oncology stakeholders be watching for next?

Knudsen: I really feel like this is the great frontier, and that frontier is going to move very quickly because of the momentum we are seeing. We’re seeing incredible abstracts presented here at ASCO, including in very difficult-to-treat cancers such as glioblastoma, with exciting phase 1 data evaluating immunotherapy combined with a cancer vaccine, specifically a personalized neoantigen vaccine. I’m very excited to see where these data are going but also excited to help lead in this space through the partnership with the Cancer Vaccine Coalition.

Some of our scientists are among those who have really pushed the forefront of cancer therapeutic vaccines in renal cancer and metastatic melanoma, and we are poised to continue leading in this area. The Cancer Vaccine Coalition was created with exactly that goal in mind: to accelerate these potentially curative therapies, get them into the hands of patients, and ensure patients can access them as quickly as possible. That is what this strategic partnership is about. We are funding more cancer vaccine research on the front end while also doing everything we can to help positive developments and research discoveries move into patient testing and clinical trials.

I think that’s quite good overall, but one other thing I would add about this particular ASCO is the positive results we are continuing to see for cell-based therapy in solid tumors, which we are also leading and are very enthusiastic about advancing further. I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the Harmony Six study and the pancreatic cancer studies from Revolution Medicines and what those findings could mean for targeted therapy in ways we may not have previously considered.

When I look at those data, I think about what the right immunotherapy combination could be alongside a RAS-targeting agent to create truly transformative outcomes for patients, beyond simply doubling response duration. If you continue to build on that approach, what does it look like if a patient with advanced pancreatic cancer is treated successfully with RAS-targeting agents, perhaps in combination with immunotherapy to reduce tumor burden, and is then treated with a therapeutic vaccine trained specifically against that patient’s tumor type to help prevent recurrence? That’s where I believe this field is heading, and we’re very proud to help lead in that space.