Horizon eBook - 2020 - 8

Engineering the Immune Response For Therapeutic Success

and inquiries about funding, spinoff opportunities, and pharma
alliances. The field was ready for immuno-oncology, in part because
of checkpoint antibodies and the progress they had made where
chemotherapy had not.
The CAR-T cells really provided the first demonstration that led to
breakthrough status, because the cells were genetically marked, and
we had striking on-target effects. The noninfectious cytokine release
syndrome that was observed with very high fever was a syndrome
never seen in medicine before. It was a striking toxicity that was
on-target, and it allowed the mechanism of action of CAR T cell to be
clearly ascertained.

JUNE: It was really astonishing for us. The field had this lukewarm
reception when the first FDA-approved cell therapy for cancer came
out. That was a dendritic cell vaccine that Dendreon had developed
for prostate cancer. It did not have a successful commercial launch,
primarily due to its very expensive cost of goods for manufacturing
the cells. It was just not a home run.
Then we had our first three CAR T‑cell patients published in August
2011. It was like the dam broke, and we had floods of requests
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The T cells actually proliferated when they encountered tumor
targets and were easily measurable because of the genetic marking
in patients. I think all that led to the realization that genetic
programming of cells actually had merit beyond what people before
previously thought was a dead end, and because there were so many
years when it did not work.
What do you think the next generation of immune therapies will
look like for cancer?
JUNE: I think it will be somewhat different for cancer than it will be
for congenital disorders, which can be repaired and thus cured using
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Horizon eBook - 2020

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