C.P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biological Engineering
Associate Director, Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

ABSTRACT

"Bioengineering of synergistic innate and adaptive immunotherapy of cancer"

Harnessing the immune system to attack cancer has started a revolution in oncology. The ability of the adaptive immune system to track such evolving pathologies has provided robust responses and cures in 10-25% of previously intractable cancers such as metastatic melanoma. The next frontier is to “raise the tail” of the survival curve in such cancers by finding synergistic combination therapies. Chemical and biological engineers have pioneered approaches that are well suited to such investigations, bringing quantitative problem-solving synthetic and analytical toolkits to bear. I’ll provide examples from my lab where cocktails of anti-tumor antibodies and cytokines have accomplished highly safe and efficacious therapies as tested in mouse models of cancer.