0:00
Hello, my
name is David McDermott.
And I'm a medical oncologist at
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical
Center in Boston, Massachusetts.
And I'm leader of the kidney cancer
program at the Dana Farber Harvard
Cancer Center as well as an
associate professor of medicine
at Harvard Medical School.
And I'm here to talk to you
today about immune checkpoint
blockade in renal cell carcinoma.
0:22
During my career as
a medical oncologist,
there have been two
waves of interest
in immune therapy for solid tumors.
I became a physician
during the first wave.
I graduated from
medical school in 1992,
when the use of
cytokine-based immunotherapy
was just reaching its peak, with
the approval, in the United States,
of high dose interleukin 2.
Right after graduating
from medical school,
I began to focus on
medical oncology.
I was interested in learning more
about the immune response to cancer
and began doing
research in this area.
Needless to say, over
the next 10 or 15 years,
the interest in solid
tumor immunotherapy
began to decline dramatically,
maybe sort of coinciding
with my career in medical research.
There was a significant rise in the
application of molecularly targeted
therapies, which began to replace
these agents, particularly
in kidney cancer, where many
of the VEGF targeted agents
proved superior to the old
cytokine-based immunotherapies.
However, in the last
five to six years,
there's been a dramatic
increase in interest
in the field of immunotherapy
not just for kidney cancer
but for other solid tumors.
And these forms of immunotherapy
have included vaccines,
recombinant t-cell receptors,
bi-specific T-cell engagers, but,
most interestingly, these
so-called checkpoint
inhibitors, which have
recently become approved
in metastatic kidney cancer.
