Many of you are probably fully aware of how immuno-oncology is changing cancer treatment. Ken Burns highlighted immunotherapy in his recent PBS series, “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies” (video link here). Forbes’ Matthew Herper, BBC and others have written extensively about it, too (here, here). More recently, Genome Magazine had a feature article on the history of immunotherapy (here). As the article states: “The promise of immunotherapy is startling in its simplicity: With a little help from cancer doctors, the patients will cure themselves.”
The key word here is “cure”. Cure!
The purpose of this blog is two-fold: (1) introduce geneticists and genomicists to cancer immunotherapy, if they have not thought about it before, and (2) highlight a recent Science publication by Elaine Mardis, Gerald Linette, and colleagues at WashU (here), with an accompanying News & Views article in Nature (here).
[Disclaimer: I am a Merck/MSD employee. The opinions I am expressing are my own and do not necessarily represent the position of my employer.]
Cancer immunotherapy is really cool! As a former practicing rheumatologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, I had thought about the role of neoantigens in autoimmunity for many years.…