The Radvanyi lab is focused on cancer immunology and immunotherapy. The main interest of the lab is how chronic inflammation drives cancer initiation and progression using in vitro and in vivo models. In this context, our work focuses on characterizing how non-coding regions of the genome (representing over 70 per cent of our DNA), including retroelements (LINE, SINE, Alu elements, and HSAT) and human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs), are reactivated in cancer and how they modulate the immune response through innate inflammation especially in early stages of tumour initiation leading to invasive cancer. The lab is also studying how retroelement and endogenous retroviral transcripts are expressed and disseminated systemically in the body through extracellular vesicles (EV) and the role of these in driving systemic chronic inflammation and immune dysfunction in cancer patients and during unhealthy aging. Lastly, another interest of the lab is capitalizing on the tumour-specific expression of retroelement and HERV open reading frames (ORFs) as novel sources of tumour-specific antigens for cancer immunotherapy using mRNA vaccines that can be used to prevent early cancer progression as way of “cancer interception”.