Immunotherapy was born at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center more than a century ago. Since then, our scientists have led advances in modern immunotherapy treatments, including immune checkpoint inhibitors, CAR T cell therapy, and cancer vaccines.
And MSK research continues to lead in the development of the next generation of immune-based therapies, while working to make current treatments more effective for more people and against more types of cancer.
Learn about a clinical trial that used immunotherapy alone to treat people with several different types of cancer, meaning they did not need to undergo surgery, radiation or chemotherapy.
Learn how MSK researchers are deploying mRNA vaccines against pancreatic cancer.
Learn how MSK researchers are trying to understand how the immune system senses cancer in order to make better immunotherapies.
Learn how researchers are making better CAR T cells by taking a lesson from viruses.
Researchers MSK and their collaborators at Mount Sinai have developed an artificial intelligence-based model to predict who will benefit from immune checkpoint inhibitors using only routine blood tests and clinical data.
Research shows that TIL therapy, an emerging type of immunotherapy, works in some patients with non-small cell lung cancer.
A team of researchers from MSK and Weill Cornell Medicine is expanding the understanding of how a decades-old treatment for bladder cancer works — an understanding that could help improve the effectiveness of immunotherapies more broadly.
Read about a new discovery that could lead to more powerful cell-based therapies for cancer.
Thetis cells, a class of immune cells first described by MSK researchers in 2022, play an essential and previously unknown role in suppressing inflammatory responses to food, a new study finds.
Work on immunotherapy spans many research programs at MSK, from basic science to clinical translation. Learn more about each of them below.
The first immunotherapy research at MSK dates back to the 1890s, when surgeon William Coley began treating cancer patients with a mixture of heat-killed bacteria (known as “Coley’s toxins”) after noticing that patients with bacterial infections sometimes saw their tumors shrink. Dr. Coley is now considered to be the “Father of Cancer Immunotherapy.”
And in the decades since, MSK has been home to numerous immuno-oncology advances, including:
MSK’s Dr. Christopher Klebanoff has been developing a new type of immunotherapy called T cell receptor (TCR) therapy using custom-built immune cells that can detect cancer markers that come from the inside of cancer cells.
