Releasing the immune system’s brake was a Nobel-winning breakthrough, but a brake release alone does not move the car.
Checkpoint inhibitors are the biggest cancer innovation in the last 20 years, and Jim Allison won the Nobel Prize in 2018 for the insight that you first have to take the foot off the brake of the immune system. But even the best of them have on average a 35% response rate. The problem is, if you take your foot off the brake but never push the gas, the car doesn’t move. You also have to stimulate the immune system, and we do that locally at the tumor. That is the second missing piece of the puzzle.
Source: Tomorrow’s Medicine, with Cyriac Roeding (eCornell Keynote)