Immunotherapy, aiming to kill tumor cells by making use of the body’s own immune system, has become an important approach in cancer therapy. However, complete tumor eradication is often hampered by an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME). In our studies reported in this thesis, we aimed to develop novel immunocombination therapies for cancer that work together to induce potent anti-tumor immune responses and create an immune permissive TME. The approaches can be divided into two categories: PART I focuses on preclinical cancer ablation studies using by high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) and cryoablation, alone or in combination with adjuvants. PART II is aimed at optimizing antiGD2 mAb mediated immunotherapy for neuroblastoma using sialic acid engineering and histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibition.

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