Immunology

Cancer immunotherapy combination trials and a failure of the free market

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What happens when commercial interests do not align? Over a decade ago in 2002 when Novartis announced it was moving its global headquarters to Boston MA, it was viewed at the time that the United State’s pharmaceutical market was the most robust and attractive, and it made sense for Novartis to have a major presence … Read more

Cancer immunotherapy and a clinical trial dilemma

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There is a numbers problem, and a biomarker one as well. Annually the worldwide cancer drug market is on the order of $110 Billion, and individual immuno-oncology drugs cost the US healthcare system on the order of $100K to $150K per year. With such large financial incentives, there are currently over 900 existing clinical trials at clinicaltrials.gov … Read more

Steven Rosenberg and T-Cell Immunotherapy for Cancer

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Steven Rosenberg, NCI at a 2014 AACR Plenary Session
Steven Rosenberg, NCI at a 2014 AACR Plenary Session

As a person who worked at a melanoma research institute once upon a time (the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica California, by the way), it was a pleasure to hear Steven Rosenberg’s plenary talk at the AACR meeting in San Diego. A lot has happened since 1997.

It was in the mid-1990’s that I was working in the laboratory of Dr. David Hoon, and the Institute was one of the few groups at that time that had several groups working on tumor immunology. One of our main ‘competitors’ in the tumor immunology field (for metastatic melanoma) was Steven Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute, which had the history of being the longest NCI Research Program Project grantees at that time (JWCI had the second-longest one).

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Sequencing the Immune Repertoire (T-Cell Receptor genes)

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Image courtesy <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-cell_receptor”>Wikipedia</a>

Immunology is a fascinating subject. Immense in its complexity, debilitating when the immune system malfunctions, our ability to fend off bacterial and viral infection, cancers of different types, and other foreign invaders is a remarkable biological capability.

The NIH estimates 24M Americans are affected with an autoimmune disorder, but that number rises to 50M when the definition is expanded from a list of 24 disorders to over 100 by the American Autoimmune Related Disease organization. It is the second highest form of chronic illness, arthritis being the most familiar to many.

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