MD Anderson launches James P. Allison immunotherapy institute to ‘enable cures’ for cancer
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer announced Thursday the launch of the James P. Allison Institute, a research and innovation hub that integrates immunobiology across disciplines to accelerate discoveries toward cancer cures.
“Our goal at the institute is to raise the survival curve for all cancers as close to 100% as we can get them, and bring cures to more patients,” the institute’s namesake, James P. Allison, PhD, said during a press conference. “We’re not trying to merely improve survival by a few weeks or months. We’re trying to enable cures, and we’re going to do that with exceptional science.”
The Allison institute will be located in state-of-the-art facilities under construction on the MD Anderson campus and will house several categories of researchers, including discovery and translational scientists who will collaborate with internal and external scientists.
“Discovery science is where we get the new ideas, a deeper understanding of how the immune system works, so we know how to harness it,” Allison said. “Because of what we have here at MD Anderson, we can rapidly translate these discoveries into new treatments that will be available to patients at MD Anderson initially and then to the world.”
Research teams will have access to the well-established infrastructure at MD Anderson, including research platforms, data science efforts and the drug discovery and development capabilities of the therapeutics discovery division, according to an MD Anderson press release. Leveraging those capabilities, along with strategic biopharma collaborations, the institute will rapidly advance discoveries from the lab to the clinic and back, with clinical insights informing ongoing laboratory studies, the release stated. The efforts will result in new drugs and tailored combinations that can be assessed in well-designed studies through MD Anderson’s clinical research engine.
“As soon as there is a good idea coming out of a laboratory, it can be shared by basic scientists, with the clinicians around to start thinking of how to apply that, with the people who are involved in producing drugs to come up with a way of making it, with the translational people to actually get it into the clinic and then to take it into the clinic, as rapidly as we possibly can,” Allison said.
Allison received the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his fundamental discoveries in T-cell biology and his invention of ipilimumab (Yervoy, Bristol Myers Squibb), the first immune checkpoint inhibitor to treat cancer, according to the press release. He will lead the institute with experts in immunotherapy and cancer research. Padmanee Sharma, MD, PhD, professor of genitourinary medical oncology and immunology at MD Anderson, will serve as the institute’s scientific director and Raghu Kalluri, MD, PhD, professor and chair of cancer biology, will serve as director of operations.
“We will empower our researchers to make scientific breakthroughs that advance our understanding of immunobiology and enable exciting new therapeutic opportunities,” Sharma said in the release. “Starting with high-impact discovery science, we will follow the evidence toward biological insights, novel treatment targets and innovative new technologies.”
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts