HEALTH AND WELLNESS
in cancer treatment are a direct of result of these foundational breakthroughs, made possible in part by the $384 million in donor support that CRI has invested in scientists over the last six decades.
Checkpoint Immunotherapy
Checkpoint inhibitors that target the PD-1/PD-L-1 pathway have been approved for eleven major cancer types in the United States and around the world, thanks in part to early work funded by CRI. While working in the Emory University lab of Rafi Ahmed, Ph.D., CRI-funded fellows E. John Wherry, Ph.D., and David Masopust, Ph.D., laid the groundwork for these therapies by showing that targeting this pathway could restore the activity of "exhausted" T cells.
These treatments, however, weren't the first checkpoint immunotherapies approved by the FDA. The first, which targets CTLA-4, was approved in 2011 after a breakthrough in a phase III clinical trial with advanced melanoma patients. CRI-funded postdoctoral fellow Dr. Frank Borriello was part of Dr. Arlene Sharpe's team at Harvard Medical School that was one of the first to help clarify the role of CTLA4 in immune responses, while James P. Allison, Ph.D., 2018 Nobel Prize recipient, current director of CRI's Scientific Advisory Council, and chair of the Department of Immunology and the executive director of the Immunotherapy Platform at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, is regarded as a pioneer and one of the driving forces behind the clinical development of anti-CTLA-4 immunotherapy.
Expanding Immunotherapy's Applications
Beyond checkpoint inhibitors, immunotherapies like vaccines can educate patients' immune systems about what cancer "looks like," while others incorporate patients' immune cells directly. These cell-based immunotherapies continue to show great promise and are improving survival for many patients, including children, living with cancer.
In 2002, Dr. Cassian Yee, a CRI-funded clinical grantee at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle (now at MD Anderson Cancer Center), helped lead groundbreaking work that was among the first to show that cancer patients' immune cells could be removed, enhanced in the lab, and then used to help fight their tumors. This work launched the development of many adoptive T cell immunotherapy approaches - including chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, an approach recently approved by the FDA for the treatment of some types of leukemia and lymphoma.
Bacteria and Viruses
People often associate bacteria and viruses with the infections that can arise from these organisms. However, because of their ability to stimulate the immune system, bacteria and viruses can also promote immune responses against cancer. In fact, the first use of immunotherapy in the 1890s - by CRI's "grandfather" Dr. William B. Coley - involved infecting cancer patients with bacteria to help stimulate their bodies to