Immunotherapy drugs that harness the body’s own immune system to fight cancer have revolutionized the treatment of many cancers. They work by blocking checkpoint inhibitor proteins like PD1, removing the brakes from cancer-killing T cells in the immune system. However, only about a third of patients respond to these drugs.
“There is still much work to be done to improve cancer immunotherapy because only a small group of people benefit, and even among those, we see many tumors relapsing,” said Dario A.A. Vignali, Ph.D., who holds the Frank Dixon Chair in Cancer Immunology at Pitt’s School of Medicine and is the co-leader of the Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy program at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center.