Special Issue of Science Devoted to Cancer Immunotherapy

The April 3, 2015, issue of the prestigious journal Science is devoted to “realizing the promise” of cancer immunology and immunotherapy. Five separate review articles, whose list of authors reads like a Who’s Who of Cancer Research Institute (CRI) scientists, cover the main research areas and treatment approaches that currently excite the field, including:

• immune checkpoint therapy, co-authored by Scientific Advisory Council (SAC) director James Allison and Dream Team grantee member Pam Sharma, both of MD Anderson Cancer Center
• adoptive T cell therapy, co-authored by 2011 William B. Coley Award winner Steven A. Rosenberg and past symposia speaker Nicholas P. Restifo
• personalized cancer vaccines, co-authored by SAC member and Dream Team grantee Ton Schumacher of The Netherlands Cancer Institute, and SAC associate director Robert Schreiber of Washington University School of Medicine
• the tumor microenvironment, co-authored by Joanna Joyce and Douglas Fearon
• the microbiota and cancer, authored by Wendy Garrett, a recipient of a CRI investigator award and a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health

Two additional research articles also discuss results of an anti-PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor in non-small cell lung cancer, co-authored by several CRI scientists, including our clinical director Jedd Wolchok of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and lung cancer page reviewer Naiyer Rizvi of Columbia University Medical Center, and advances in natural killer (NK) cell biology written by Weiwen Deng, a CRI postdoctoral fellow, and David Raulet, a CRI investigator award recipient, of UC-Berkeley.

Science is one of the world’s most respected scientific journals. In December 2013, the journal voted Cancer Immunotherapy the “Breakthrough of the Year.”