Immunotherapy is among the most-watched areas of medicine. It’s already proved enormously effective in treating several cancers, but it doesn’t work for everyone. Dr. Steven Rosenberg, Chief of Surgery at the National Cancer Institute and a pioneer in immunotherapy research and treatment, says that’s what keeps him up at night not the patients he’s been able to help, but those he hasn’t.
“Using a patient’s own immune cells is a very complex way to treat a cancer,” says Dr. Rosenberg. His team has developed methods for genetically modifying a patient’s own immune cells “to recognize the cancer in a new way” and to kill it. There have been major breakthroughs. The FDA recently approved a new therapy called Yescarta to treat people with non-Hodgkin lymphoma who haven’t responded to chemotherapy.