s04e09: Stephen Forman: Cellular Immunotherapy for treatment of cancer: from transplant to gene therapy

Distinctive Voices

Stephen Forman, City of Hope: One of the first demonstrations of the immune systems ability to recognize and reject cancer came from the work done in stem cell transplantation as a treatment for leukemia. This therapeutic effect has been now shown for many other cancers including lymphoma, leukemia, and myeloma and actually contributes to the cure of patients undergoing this procedure. In the years that followed, research was conducted to develop an immune therapy that was specific for a given cancer by introducing new genes into healthy immune cells( T cells) that endows the cells with the ability to recognize proteins on the surface of the cancer cell and eliminate it, similar to what the immune system does against viruses. This has now lead to a new therapy that is being increasingly utilized in the treatment of people with cancer using genetically engineered immune cells in addition to the traditional treatments of chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation. For some cancers, we can now imagine a time when immune based therapies will replace many of the chemotherapy approaches we now use for cancer.