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My name is Jonathan Schoenfeld,
I'm an Assistant Professor
at Harvard Medical School
and a Radiation Oncologist
at the Dana Farber
Cancer Institute
with a clinical interest
in immunotherapy
and head and neck cancer.
Today, I will be speaking about
immune checkpoint blockade,
and head and neck cancer.
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Before I talk about
tumor immunotherapy,
I thought it would be useful
to contrast the history
of immunotherapy
in a setting where we are all
more familiar with its use,
and that is in
infectious disease.
There was a great
degree of skepticism
when the first
successful immunotherapy
was developed in the 1800s
in the form of a vaccination
against small pox.
As you can see
in the cartoon on the left,
there were significant
public concerns
that the material
in the vaccination
was derived
from cowpox lesions.
And indeed, no one
volunteered to get vaccinated
for over three months
after this vaccination
was first offered.
Eventually, of course,
small pox vaccination
led to the near
eradication of this disease.
And just over
a hundred years later,
the practice of vaccination
continued to revolutionize
the field of medicine.
As you can see in
the figure on the right,
there was no
shortage of volunteers
for the first successful
polio vaccine in the 1950s.
Indeed the lines for this
vaccine stretched for blocks
when it was first offered
at the institutes for help
in Washington, D.C.
And this vaccination
ultimately led to the near
eradication of this disease.
Obviously, the polio
and smallpox vaccinations
were just the beginning
of the development
of many other vaccines
targeting other viruses.
Currently, vaccination
and immunotherapy
remains of critical importance
to public health worldwide
in eradicating
infectious disease.
