What Role Does Personal Medicine Play in Cancer Immunotherapy? (1:27)
We now have a way to target mutations that exist in each cancer, leading to potentially a highly personalized treatment, says Steven Rosenberg, MD. Watch as he explains how immunotherapies work.
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Several aspects to that, understanding the kinds of mutations that lead to cancer is very important, but when we talk about immunotherapy we're looking for targets that the immune system can attack, and we've just come to realize in the last 2 years, that most immunotherapies probably are reacting against these unique mutations.
And in fact in a look or two which's just a start, we published in science just 2 months ago a whole new technique for specifically targeting the immune system against mutations that exist in each individual cancer. Then you get responses to what you're looking to, or to one of the check point modulators like a luma lab and anti PD1, they are probably reacting against that're present in the cancer, that is, are stimulating immune responses which naturally have occurred against those mutations.
We now have a way potentially those target those mutations, but that's only a couple of months old. And our feeling is that and if we can develop that, it's potentially a highly personalized treatment for many different types of cancer. So in fact the patient that we successfully treated in this paper in science was a patient with a cholangiocarcinoma, a bile duct tumor, one of the common epithelial cancers that result in so many deaths in this country.
Dr. Rosenberg pioneered the development of effective immunotherapies for patients with advanced cancers. His studies have resulted in the regression of metastatic cancer in patients with melanoma, sarcomas and lymphomas.
