Roswell Park at the Forefront of Cutting-Edge Immunotherapy
Courtesy of Roswell Park Cancer Talk Blog
Immunotherapy — using the body’s immune system to fight off disease — represents a new frontier in cancer treatment. Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center has been instrumental in developing many immunotherapies and bringing emerging options, clinical trials, and immunotherapies to patients months or years before they are available from other providers, and even before FDA approval.
Our immune systems protect our bodies from harmful invaders like bacteria, viruses, and other diseases, but cancer often prevents our immune system from doing its job. This is because cancer occurs when something in our immune system breaks down. “Immunotherapy seeks to restore the function of the immune system so it can fight the cancer,” says Roswell Park’s Igor Puzanov, MD, MSCI, FAPC, Senior Vice President of Clinical Investigation. “And not just for a little while, but to kill it for good.”
As a comprehensive cancer center designated by the National Cancer Institute and in the top tier of less than 4% of cancer centers, Roswell Park draws elite cancer scientists and physicians from around the world, especially those who work in immunotherapy. Among them is a team of researchers who were central to historic breakthroughs in immunotherapy strategies and the development of today’s FDA-approved treatments. “Using the immune system means we can do much better,” says Renier Brentjens, MD, PhD, Deputy Director and Chair of the Department of Medicine. “We can more specifically target just the cancer cells and not the healthy tissue. Immunotherapy has shifted the way we view cancer treatment.”
The first real immunotherapy breakthrough came around 2010 with the advent of immune checkpoint inhibitors — drugs that release the immune system’s inherent “brakes” and activate it to resume its job. Roswell Park patients had access to that first checkpoint inhibitor drug, ipilimumab (Yervoy) through clinical trials before FDA approval. In 2017, when the first chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, a cutting-edge cellular therapy, was approved for certain forms of leukemia, Roswell Park was the only center in the region capable of providing the complex therapy.
Choosing Roswell Park for immunotherapy provides patients with access to a world-renowned team of physicians and scientists who were central to historic breakthroughs in immunotherapy strategies. Today, Roswell Park researchers are developing novel immunotherapies and new ways of using immunotherapy of many types, including cell therapies that work against solid tumor cancers, such as next-generation CAR T-cell therapies, tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy, plus monoclonal antibodies, oncolytic viral therapy, cytokines and treatment vaccines, and a ground-breaking vaccine for glioblastoma, SurVaxM, invented at Roswell Park.
Last fall, Roswell Park was named New York state’s first cell and gene therapy hub, fueling the expansion of its cellular therapy research and cell manufacturing capacity. Having built 14 new clean room facilities to manufacture cell products, Roswell Park is streamlining the development of new cell and immune-based therapies and bringing them to the patients who need them that are unavailable anywhere else. Learn more at https://www.roswellpark.org/cancertalk/202406/roswell-park-forefront-cutting-edge-immunotherapy.
For more great articles, visit www.roswellpark.org/cancertalk. To make an appointment at Roswell, call 1-800-767-9355.