Immersion in the search for effective cancer immunotherapies

• Published in: Molecular medicine (Cambridge, Mass.) Vol. 27; no. 1; p. 63
• Main Author: Rosenberg, Steven A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England BioMed Central 16.06.2021; BMC
• Subjects: Adoptive transfer; Animals; Antigens; Cancer; Cancer therapies; Education; Gastric cancer; History, 20th Century; History, 21st Century; Hospitals; Humans; Immune system; Immunology; Immunotherapy; Immunotherapy - adverse effects; Immunotherapy - history; Immunotherapy - methods; Kidney transplants; Laboratories; Lymphocytes; Medical research; Metastasis; Neoplasms - etiology; Neoplasms - therapy; Patients; Science; Surgery; T-cells; Tumors; Poland; T-cells; Lymphocytes; Immunotherapy; Adoptive transfer; Cancer
• ISSN: 1076-1551; 1528-3658
• DOI: 10.1186/s10020-021-00321-3

The unique clinical course of patients can provide physicians with insights not found in textbooks. After 1 year there (1970) with the war in Vietnam raging, I joined the Public Health Service and became an Immunology Fellow at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Early research at the NIH When I came to the NIH July 1, 1974, I was determined to work on understanding whether there was any immune response to growing cancer in humans that might then lead to an effective cancer immunotherapy. An article in the British Journal of Cancer at the time I moved to NCI was the subject of much discussion because it concluded that no immune response had ever been shown to occur in reaction to a spontaneously arising cancer in animals or man and that results from the study of transplanted tumors in mice had little relevance to human cancers (Hewitt et al. 1976).