0:00
Hello, my name is
Elizabeth Buchbinder,
and I'm a physician within
the Melanoma Disease Center
at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute,
and an instructor
at Harvard Medical School.
And today,
I'm going to be talking about
Immune Checkpoint Blockade
in Melanoma.
0:15
Immunotherapy has really been
in the news a lot
in the last few years,
in terms of the amazing advances
that have been seen
in the treatment of cancer
through the use of immunotherapy.
However,
some of the earliest efforts
to use the immune system
to battle against cancer,
where in the early 1900s,
when Dr. Coley,
surgeon at the time,
discovered
that some of his patients
who developed
post-operative wound infections
had subsequent responses
in their tumors
and shrinkage of their cancer.
And he attempted to use this
to elicit immune responses
in patients
by causing infections
in their wound and their cancer.
He had some success, however,
in the end it was not
something that caught on,
given the fact that,
many patients got very sick
related to these infections.
However, throughout time,
there have been
spontaneous regressions of cancer
and some felt that a lot of these
are related
to the immune system's function
and immune regulation
of malignancy.
1:18
In addition to evidence
that the immune system
is causing regression in tumors,
there is also evidence
that the immune system can prevent
the development of tumors,
as can be observed in the fact
that transplant patients who are
on strong immunosuppressives
have a much higher risk
of developing malignancy
as compared
to the general population.
And some of the tumors
that are most commonly seen
within these patients
are those tumors that we now know
have a very close relationship
with the immune system
and are tightly regulated by it
such as kidney cancer and melanoma.
