Drs. Diba Latifi
My hope is that, over the next five to ten years, people with this devastating disease will live considerably longer and with a much better quality of life.
— Diba Latifi
Meet Diba Latifi, a clinician-researcher in the Department of Surgery at Erasmus MC. Diba began her PhD under Professor Casper van Eijck on 1 November 2016 and was one of the team's first doctoral researchers.
Alongside treating patients with Ampligen through a named-patient programme, Diba sees patients in the outpatient clinic and helps set up new studies. Her main focus is the immune-monitoring project, which examines how the immune system is involved in pancreatic cancer and how standard treatments and Ampligen affect the immune response.
Since 1 November 2016, blood samples have been collected from newly diagnosed patients at several points during treatment. Researchers compare immune responses across different stages of pancreatic cancer and with those of healthy volunteers. The target was 200 participants; around 100 had joined when this interview was conducted, with full data collection expected to take another eighteen months.
Diba supports participants in the immune-monitoring study and ensures that their samples reach Dr Reno Debets’s laboratory on time. Specialist analyst Astrid Oostvogels processes the samples there.
The project investigates how the immune system relates to tumour development, which differences exist between patient groups and how the findings compare with published research. A better understanding of each person’s immune system may eventually allow clinicians to predict which treatment is most likely to work. In many cases, that is expected to be a combination of therapies.
The findings can help us move more quickly towards immunotherapy for people with pancreatic cancer. We hope this will improve survival in the near future.