Johanna A. Joyce, who heads a laboratory in Sloan-Kettering Institute's Cancer Biology and Genetics Program, spoke about how cancer cells are influenced by the environment in which they grow and by the other cells that surround them. These other cells are called the tumor microenvironment, and much of Dr. Joyce's talk focused on potential strategies for developing drugs to target that microenvironment as a way to kill cancer cells. "The take-home message is that [we want to] target cells within the tumor microenvironment, in combination with agents that target tumor cells," she said. "The idea then is that we can have effective [cancer treatments] and stable disease."
The body's immune system, and the extent to which it is able to recognize cancer cells as abnormal and mobilize to control or eliminate them, was the subject of the talk by James P. Allison, Chair of Sloan-Kettering Institute's Immunology Program. Dr. Allison described a variety of strategies for harnessing the immune system to target cancer cells, including an antibody that blocks CTLA-4, a protein that inhibits immune responses to cancer. "One of the things . . . that attracted us to this sort of scheme for trying to treat cancer," he said, "[is that] since we're manipulating the immune system and not trying to target individual tumor cells, this approach should be effective against any kind of cancer."