WEHI, previously known as the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, and as the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, is Australia's oldest medical research institute. Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, who won the Nobel Prize in 1960 for his work in immunology, was director from 1944 to 1965. Burnet developed the ideas of clonal selection and acquired immune tolerance. Later, Professor Donald Metcalf discovered and characterised colony-stimulating factors. As of 2015, the institute hosted more than 750 researchers who work to understand, prevent and treat diseases including blood, breast and ovarian cancers; inflammatory diseases (autoimmunity) such as rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes and coeliac disease; and infectious diseases such as malaria, HIV and hepatitis B and C.
In biology, chimeric antigen receptors (CARs)—also known as chimeric immunoreceptors, chimeric T cell receptors or artificial T cell receptors—are receptor proteins that have been engineered to give T cells the new ability to target a specific antigen. The receptors are chimeric in that they combine both antigen-binding and T cell activating functions into a single receptor.
Cancer immunotherapy is the stimulation of the immune system to treat cancer, improving on the immune system's natural ability to fight the disease. It is an application of the fundamental research of cancer immunology and a growing subspecialty of oncology.
Virotherapy is a treatment using biotechnology to convert viruses into therapeutic agents by reprogramming viruses to treat diseases. There are three main branches of virotherapy: anti-cancer oncolytic viruses, viral vectors for gene therapy and viral immunotherapy. These branches use three different types of treatment methods: gene overexpression, gene knockout, and suicide gene delivery. Gene overexpression adds genetic sequences that compensate for low to zero levels of needed gene expression. Gene knockout uses RNA methods to silence or reduce expression of disease-causing genes. Suicide gene delivery introduces genetic sequences that induce an apoptotic response in cells, usually to kill cancerous growths. In a slightly different context, virotherapy can also refer more broadly to the use of viruses to treat certain medical conditions by killing pathogens.
Jacques Francis Albert Pierre Miller AC FRS FAA is a French-Australian research scientist. He is known for having discovered the function of the thymus and for the identification, in mammalian species of the two major subsets of lymphocytes and their function.
Steven A. Rosenberg is an American cancer researcher and surgeon, chief of Surgery at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland and a Professor of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences and the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. He pioneered the development of immunotherapy that has resulted in the first effective immunotherapies and the development of gene therapy. He is the first researcher to successfully insert foreign genes into humans.
Cancer immunology is an interdisciplinary branch of biology that is concerned with understanding the role of the immune system in the progression and development of cancer; the most well known application is cancer immunotherapy, which utilises the immune system as a treatment for cancer. Cancer immunosurveillance and immunoediting are based on protection against development of tumors in animal systems and (ii) identification of targets for immune recognition of human cancer.
Adoptive cell transfer (ACT) is the transfer of cells into a patient. The cells may have originated from the patient or from another individual. The cells are most commonly derived from the immune system with the goal of improving immune functionality and characteristics. In autologous cancer immunotherapy, T cells are extracted from the patient, genetically modified and cultured in vitro and returned to the same patient. Comparatively, allogeneic therapies involve cells isolated and expanded from a donor separate from the patient receiving the cells.
James Patrick Allison is an American immunologist and Nobel laureate who holds the position of professor and chair of immunology and executive director of immunotherapy platform at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas.
Kite Pharma is an American biotechnology company that develops cancer immunotherapy products, with a primary focus on genetically engineered autologous CAR T cell therapy, a cell-based therapy which relies on chimeric antigen receptors and T cells. Founded in 2009 and based in Santa Monica, California, it was acquired by Gilead Sciences in 2017.
Zelig Eshhar is an Israeli immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. He was Chairman of the Department of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute twice, in the 1990s and 2000s.
Professor Anne Kelso is an Australian biomedical researcher specialising in immunology and influenza. She is the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Government's National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).
Padmanee Sharma is an immunologist and oncologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. She holds the position of professor of genitourinary medical oncology and immunology in the Division of Cancer Medicine where she specializes in renal, prostate, and bladder cancers.
Crystal L. Mackall is an American physician and immunologist. She is currently the Ernest and Amelia Gallo Family Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at Stanford University. She is the founding director of the Stanford Center for Cancer Cell Therapy.
Peter Edward Fecci is an American neurosurgeon, professor and researcher. He is an Associate Professor of Neurosurgery, Pathology and Immunology at Duke University School of Medicine. He also serves as Director of the Duke Center for Brain and Spine Metastasis, Director of the Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program, Residency Program Director, and Associate Deputy Director of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke.
Marcela V. Maus is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Cellular Immunotherapy Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. She works on immunotherapy for the treatment of cancer, using genetically engineered T cells to target malignancies (cancer).
Donald M. O'Rourke is an American neurosurgeon and the John Templeton, Jr., MD Professor of Neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1983, and attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania where he also completed neurosurgical residency training. He established the institution's human brain tumor tissue bank in 2001. An elected member of the American Academy of Neurological Surgery, his research at the Translational Center of Excellence in the Abramson Cancer Center focuses on Glioblastoma Multiforme, especially the design and investigation of Chimeric Antigen Receptor immune therapies.
Michel Sadelain is an immunologist and genetic engineer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York, where he holds the Steve and Barbara Friedman Chair. He is the founding director of the Center for Cell Engineering and the head of the Gene Transfer and Gene Expression Laboratory. He is a member of the department of medicine at Memorial Hospital and of the immunology program at the Sloan Kettering Institute. He is best known for his major contributions to T cell engineering and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy, an immunotherapy based on the genetic engineering of a patient's own T cells to treat cancer.
Epitopoietic Research Corporation (ERC) is a Belgian Pharmaceutical company developing ERC1671, which specialise in treatment for Glioblastoma multiforme which is the most aggressive form of brain cancer. In 2019, ERC became the first pharmaceutical company to provide treatment under the US Federal Right-to-try law.
Philip Greenberg is a Professor of Medicine, Oncology and Immunology at the University of Washington and Head of Program in Immunology at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. His research is centered around T cell biology and therapeutic cell therapies. He is a co-founder of Juno Therapeutics and Affini-T.
