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Audio Interview

Immunotherapy in cancer research: recent advancements (2026)

Published on July 30, 2026   10 min

Other Talks in the Playlist: Annual Interviews

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Interviewer: Joining us today is Dr. Mustafa Khasraw, Professor of Neurosurgery and Medicine at Duke University and Deputy Director of the Center for Cancer Immunotherapy at the Duke Cancer Institute. A global expert in cancer immunotherapy, Dr. Khasraw leads first-in-human Phase I trials, biomarker research, and translational studies that bring lab discoveries to patients. He's here today to share his insights on the latest advancements in this field. Dr. Khasraw, thank you very much for joining us today. Prof. Khasraw: Thanks for having me. Interviewer: Over the past year or so, what do you see as the most significant advancements in cancer immunotherapy and why? Prof. Khasraw: I guess cancer immunotherapy, it's a rapidly advancing field and historically when I trained as a medical oncologist, the backbone of treatment for cancer was surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. But over the last couple of decades, targeted therapy and immunotherapy have established themselves as pillars of cancer treatment, and that is a significant change in treatment paradigm. So we have gone from treating patients with poison, which is basically chemotherapy, to treating the patients with more smartly designed targeted therapies and immunotherapies that recruit the native immune system of the patient to attack the cancer. Through this process, initial wave of therapies that have shown efficacy were immune checkpoint inhibitors like PD-1, PD-L1 inhibitors, drugs like pembrolizumab, nivolumab, ipilimumab, CTLA-4 inhibitors, etc. On the back of those discoveries,

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Immunotherapy in cancer research: recent advancements (2026)

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