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Cancer immunology ‘Dream Team’ formed
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Stand Up To Cancer and the Cancer Research Institute announced the formation of a “Dream Team” project dedicated to cancer immunology.
The team will receive $10 million in funding over 3 years for a translational cancer research project that will unite laboratory and clinical efforts leading to the immunological treatment, control and prevention of cancer.
Antoni Ribas
Team leaders will be James P. Allison, PhD, chairman of the department of immunology, director of the immunotherapy platform and co-director of the David H. Koch Center for Applied Research of Genitourinary Cancers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Antoni Ribas, MD, PhD, professor of medicine, surgery and molecular and medical pharmacology, and director of the tumor immunology program area at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA.
James P. Allison
“The goal of our Dream Team is to expand, optimize and explore combinations of two novel immunotherapies, immune checkpoint blockade and adoptive T-cell transfer,” Allison said in a press release. “It is our dream, indeed our expectation, that by optimizing these two uniquely successful and complementary approaches, we will be able achieve durable responses in a large percentage of patients suffering from a variety of types of cancer.”
Team co-leaders are Drew M. Pardoll, MD, PhD, director of the division of immunology and Abeloff professor in the departments of oncology, medicine, pathology and molecular biology and genetics at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at The Johns Hopkins University, and Cassian Yee, MD, a member of the clinical research division and program in immunology at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Other principal members of the team are David Baltimore, PhD, of California Institute of Technology; Glenn Dranoff, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Philip D. Greenberg, MD, of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; Ton Schumacher, PhD, of Netherlands Cancer Institute; and Jedd D. Wolchok, MD, PhD, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Wolchok also is a HemOnc Today Editorial Board member.