Cancer Immunology

The mission of the Cancer Immunology (CI) Research Program is to improve understanding of the host response to cancer and to discover and test novel approaches to harness that response to improve patient outcomes. Drs. Sznol, Bosenberg, and Rothlin lead the CI program and are experienced investigators with a history of sustained NCI funding and multiple contributions in cancer immunology.

Immune checkpoint blockade for cancer treatment has emerged as one of the most exciting and promising new approaches to treat cancer in decades. CI has played a leading role in bringing this revolutionary approach into the clinic with several seminal studies that introduced checkpoint blockade targeting the PD1/PD-L1 pathway in the therapy of melanoma, lung, gastric, head/neck, and bladder cancer. The program engages basic immunologists and cancer biologists, provides the infrastructure required for high-quality monitoring of immune responses in cancer patients, and facilitates the design and conduct of clinical studies of immune and cell-based therapies in collaboration with clinical colleagues in other YCC programs and at other institutions.

The goals of the Cancer Immunology Program are to: