Transcript: The Cancer Innovation Bottleneck: Why Your Immune System Is Smarter Than Any Drug |
Dr. Karen Knudsen
Joelle Kaufman: Karen. Let’s dive in. You talked about the unbelievable change before and after immunotherapy to cancer care.
Can you explain? What do you mean? What is that?
Dr. Karen E Knudsen, CEO: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when I first got into oncology as a scientist, and then also as a, as a healthcare executive leading oncology for one of the largest health systems in the us. So all the, all the science, but all the. Clinical TA care diagnosis down. I remember the days before and after immunotherapy very well. Now. For decades we had surgical intervention, chemotherapy and radiation therapy [00:01:00] as the mainstays of how we treated cancer, all cancers, and then incomes, immunotherapy. And the first in was really identifying new ways to use your train, your own immune system to see your cancer. So something that a lot of people don’t really realize outside the medical field is that your own immune system is very good at detecting cells that are not you. People often that?
that’s the case. If. If you’re detecting bacteria or a cell that’s been infected by a virus, something that it should eradicate from existence. It also recognizes cancer cells, cells that were you and still are, but have mutated to the point that they’ve attained cancer characteristics and your immune system is trained to see it. So that’s happening all the time. It’s happening right now while you and I are talking. And what immunotherapy, or a class of immunotherapy called checkpoint inhibitor [00:02:00] therapy, uh, is designed to do, is to eliminate a cloaking mechanism that tumors use to hide from the, from your own immune system. And so, checkpoint, uh, inhibitor therapy essentially allows the tumor to to be seen by your own immune system, and it’s been incumbent. Incredibly powerful anti-cancer agent for cancers that were very difficult to treat. Aggressive lung cancers, metastatic melanoma, which, you know, really there were so few, uh, potential therapies to use against, uh, bladder cancer. And the list of cancers continues initially starting off as just checkpoint inhibitor on its own, and now in combinations.
Smart combinations based on science with immunotherapy, radiation therapy, and other types of immunotherapies as well. So it’s opened up a whole new door for us, and that’s just one class of [00:03:00] immunotherapy.
