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VIDEO: James P. Allison, PhD, details century-long evolution of immune therapy in fight against cancer
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James P. Allison, PhD, chair of the department of immunology and executive director of the immunotherapy platform at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, offers an in-depth look at employing immune-based strategies to combat cancer from the early days to recent research.
‘The idea of mobilizing the immune system to treat cancer has been around for a long time,” he says, providing context for a century of development with details on how a “mostly correct” notion by German scientist Paul Erlich followed by “fundamental research to understand the complexity of T-cell activation” led the field to discover checkpoint blockade.
Allison highlights the evolution in understanding antigen receptors and required co-stimulatory signaling, pointing to findings on the CTLA-4 molecule that illuminated how opposing “go” and “stop” programs in the immune system could be leveraged to attack cancer cells.
With past research focused mainly on driver mutations, causes of cancer and genomic sequencing, Allison notes the concept of manipulating the immune system was “quite controversial for quite a while.”
“We proposed … basically ignoring the cancer and just blocking the inhibitory molecules on the immune system and letting it be more efficient and continue running to eliminate cancer cells.”
Allison discusses the PD-1 checkpoint, underscores that co-stimulatory molecules are now being uncovered for several other known checkpoints and highlights new investigations into combining checkpoints with one another as well as with other treatments.
“There is a lot of work going on now trying to determine the best way to raise the fraction of patients who respond and obtain durable responses in many kinds of cancers.”