In 1980, Dr. Steven Rosenberg was the chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute. He thought it might be possible to harness a patient’s own immune system to fight cancer.
To many, this seemed impossible because the immune system is trained to recognize and guard one’s own cells. Cancer cells, which originate from our cells, were therefore invisible to the immune system.
Or were they?
Rosenberg believed T cells, the lymphocyte foot soldiers of our immune system, could recognize tumor cells as foreign and kill them, but that there were rarely enough activated T cells to complete the job.
He devised a new approach — supercharge a patient's T cell activity using IL-2, a cytokine protein immune cells secrete that promotes T cell growth.
For four years, Rosenberg failed. He treated 66 patients; all of them died.
His 67th patient was a 33-year-old U.S. Navy officer named Linda Taylor. She suffered from terminal metastatic melanoma. All of her prior treatments had failed.
Rosenberg grew billions of Taylor’s T cells in a laboratory. On November 29, 1984, he infused these back into her bloodstream and inoculated her with IL-2 repeatedly, hoping to put her immune system into overdrive.
Over the next four months, Taylor’s tumors diminished, and then disappeared. She was the first patient in history to be cured by immunotherapy.
This success set the stage for further advances, like "checkpoint inhibitors," drugs that famously cured President Jimmy Carter’s metastatic melanoma in 2015, and “CAR-T cell therapy,” in which scientists engineer T cells that specifically recognize the antigens displayed on the outside of patients’ unique tumor cells. It’s like using a laser-guided, smart bomb to take out cancer cells with minimal collateral damage.
Immunotherapy drugs are not perfect. They can cause side effects associated with immune hyperactivity and aren’t yet effective against many types of cancer. But the advent of immunotherapy 40 years ago was a generational breakthrough that gives us greater confidence that the defeat of cancer will not be a matter of "if" but "when."
Dr. Andrew Lam is an author, retina surgeon and Select Board member from Longmeadow, Massachusetts.
His latest book, "The Masters of Medicine," tells the stories of some of the greatest discoveries in medical history.
A version of this story was first published by USA Today.
