How science and philanthropy re-programmed cancer treatment

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A key problem in treating cancer is that the immune system often fails to do a critical part of its job: recognizing cancer cells that don’t belong. Special immune cells known as T-cells, a type of white blood cells, are supposed to recognize and help to destroy dangerous cells. In cancer, however, the T-cells don’t properly attack cancerous tumors.

CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T-cell therapy was designed to teach immune cells to recognize cancer cells. Some of the body’s T cells are removed and genetically retrained to find a specific chunk of biological code – the cancer fingerprint. When the T-cells are returned to the body, they hunt down and destroy all cells with that fingerprint. These engineered “hunter cells” live on in the body as a permanent defense long after the cancer is gone.

On August 30, 2017— the day I’ll never forget—the FDA approved Kymriah™, the first therapy of its kind, to treat pediatric and young-adult leukemia. The platform was approved for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma the next year. The dream of getting a person’s own immune system to fight cancer had become a reality right in front of our eyes.

I oversee a large lab at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, and our goal is to develop new ways to listen to the immune system and use that information to predict or treat disease. We want to understand how the immune system functions in health and why it can fail in disease.

With immunotherapy, the thing being injected into the body is targeting the cells of the immune system, not the cells causing the disease. It’s training the immune system to become the drug. If we can retrain the immune system, those changes last much longer than anything we inject because our immune system can evolve and change as a tumor or infection changes in a way that no traditional drug can do.

We have already begun to use Immune Health® at Penn to profile the immune system’s responses to disease and put this work into high gear to understand COVID-19. By profiling the immune systems of patients with COVID-19, we’ve been able to publish findings that help us understand which patients might get more severe disease. We are also launching similar profiling efforts across disease areas here at Penn Medicine. The possibilities for this are so exciting!

E. JOHN WHERRY, PH.D., is director of the Institute for Immunology and chair of the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2020, Dr. Wherry received a donation from Healthnetwork and their donors for COVID-19 research. Two of Dr. Wherry’s colleagues, Dr. Bruce Levine and Dr. Robert Vonderheide, received Service Excellence Awards from Healthnetwork as well in support of their visionary work in cancer research.