Immunotherapy: Helping our bodies cure cancer

hey there everybody and welcome again to another insights my name is joe komsky and i'm the senior director of philanthropy for sanford bernard previous today i think we have one of the coolest topics we've ever had for insights immunotherapy so what is immunotherapy simply put it's using our body's own immune system to fight cancer and other diseases now why is this important the way we treat cancer today is so so difficult on the body if you think about it radiation chemotherapy what we're really trying to do it's a race it's a race to kill all the bad stuff before we kill the good stuff and that is so difficult on a person and even if we do um are able to treat and cure the disease uh it it still is so hard on a body and can lead to complications afterwards but what if we could use our immune system to fight cancer our immune systems are such efficient fighting machines right there's there's so um they're so great at that i mean it may not seem like it right when you've got the flu but think about it you've got the flu you've got a virus you're down for three or four days and then we're generally back to normal our immune system is really good at that and it also continues to patrol the body looking for other diseases there's also a ton of things that our immune systems fix in our body that we don't even know about because it's just going on and doing it it's repairing cells it's repairing um all the other things in our body that are going wrong so today we're going to hear from three of our foremost experts on immunotherapy about the work that they're doing to help our immune systems fight cancer and other diseases if they're successful one day we may be able to eliminate treatments like chemotherapy that are almost as bad as the disease itself their work is instrumental in finding more efficient and humane ways to treat illnesses as always if you have questions for our speakers please use the q a button on the on the bottom of the screen you can do that at any time and then we will ask questions of our speakers after each of our scientists speak we'll have a quick q a with them and then at the end we'll bring everybody back for um for questions so our first speaker today is dr linda bradley dr bradley is the director of aging cancer and immuno oncology program at sanford-burnham previous nci designated cancer center and is recognized as a key contributor in the field of cd4 t-cell biology dr bradley's lab is focused on understanding the regulation of human t cells in an effort to enhance patient responses to their tumors and is working to develop biologics for treatments of patients with autoimmunity and cancer dr bradley welcome to insights please go ahead thank you joe um it's a great pleasure to be here today let me get my screen to you and have this opportunity to speak with you as joe mentioned i am an immunologist by training which means i study the cells of the immune system and how the body defends itself against infections joining me today are going to be two people from my lab dr jennifer hope who's a postdoctoral fellow and dr dennis otero who is managing our staff scientist who's managing our pharma programs so cancer of course you all know is a horrific disease and here it's showing the estimated new cases in the united states in 2021 and you can see that cancer is can affect multiple tissues and the incidences are different in men and women but that primarily occurs with the gender specific diseases such as prostate and breast cancer but what is cancer so cancer refers to a collection of more than 200 disease and in all cases this is caused by the abnormal growth and unrestricted growth of cells so what are cells cells are the basic units that make up all the tissues of the body and in every tissue the cells are specialized to perform specific functions and the human body is made of trillions of cells in all types of cancers some of the body's cells mutate and begin to divide uncontrollably and they can then supply spread to surrounding tissues cancer can start in almost anywhere in the body immunotherapy is a new fairly new approach to treatment of cancer and immunotherapies are now being tested in almost every and implemented for most types of cancer but what is immunotherapy so as joe alluded to in the beginning essentially immunotherapy is a term that's applied to any drug treatment or therapy that boosts the body's immune response to help it fight off cancer often treatments that involve immunotherapy or engaging the immune system are currently being done with traditional cancer treatments such as a radiation and chemotherapy however there are many different types of immunotherapy and responses to immunotherapy can differ with different cancer cell types and some types of cancers that include for example pancreatic cancer and prostate cancer are very poorly responsible to immunotherapy by any approach so some patients with cancers that include metastatic melanoma lung cancer and leukemias respond really well to immunotherapy but there are always patients that don't respond or patients whose responses relax that relapse and their cancer takes hold against so a key goal of the research of myself my lab and many other people in the field at this time is to optimize and individualize treatments so that one day we may cure cancer in most if not all patients so what is the basis for cancer immunotherapy well this is the immune system and the immune system is made up of tissues such as lymph nodes which you probably are remember when you get sick and you may have a swollen gland in your your neck uh that is partly your the response of your lymph node this t cells in your lymph node the lymph nodes are are connected throughout the body by the lymphatic network that's shown here in this cartoon and the cells that i study in my lab specifically are called t cells and they are a collection of cells among many white different types of white blood cells that specifically to control the body in search of infectious agents such as viruses and bacteria when they encounter them in the lymph nodes they can multiply dramatically and then be released into via the lymphatics or via the blood to go back to a tissue where there's a site of infection and there they work to resolve the infection and t cells in particular are excellent at being killing virally infected cells or cells infected with other intracellular pathogens another job of the immune system is to recognize abnormal cells throughout the body that can develop from genetic mutations so what exactly is immunotherapy well these are examples of immunotherapy that are in the clinics today so adoptive t therapy refers to taking a patient's own t-cells from their blood engineering them to recognize their tumor and then growing them up to be in the numbering billions and reinfusing those cells into a patient and this has been very effective for particularly for blood cancers but not for other cancers today another type of immunotherapy we call nonspecific and here i've listed two proteins that are products of immune cells cells of the immune system that have immune protein protein and t cell or immune immuno modulating enhancing effects there we also have being tried called what's called oncolytic virus therapy and this case has only been treated so far with melanoma where a common cold virus called herpes is used to inject a tumor specifically directly the t these uh virus replicates only in those cells not in normal cells thereby killing the cancer and then there's great hope for cancer vaccines i think most people know about the preventative vaccine for human papilloma virus which can ultimately lead to at least six different cancers later in life and that's really the star so far for preventative vaccines treatment vaccines are fewer but are being widely studied and in this case the goal is to utilize agents that will help jump-start the immune system while cancer is already on board but many of you have probably heard about immune checkpoint blockade or monoclonal antibody treatment some of these treatments are even advertised on television so in 2018 the nobel prize for medicine was given to two individuals in the field of immunology who discovered pd1 and ctla4 over the past two decades now these treatments are given to patients routinely for certain cancers now such as malignant melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer and they are also being tried in virtually every type of cancer because of their very profound efficacy in a few patients so unfortunately for uh the field the monoclonal antibody treatments or immune checkpoint blockade is not at um it's not the end of the line and will work for everyone so each individual cancer can be detected at a different stage and some cancers develop mechanisms to prevent the immune response from getting underway so our laboratory is studying t cells as we mentioned earlier on we initially started in my work many years ago studying uh immune responses to viruses and it was the hope back then that we could harness the immune system to cure cancer and in fact most of you are probably not old enough to remember nixon's war on cancer and the immunologists were going to figure out how to cure it well today we are making great strides in this this is showing you now t cells in blue and a cancer cell in red and the t cells are ganging up on the tumor cells and they're directly killing them and i'm going to show you a video which i think is shows the amazing capacity of the t cells to kill tumor cells so the t cells are the smaller rounder cells that are circular climbing all over the elongated tumor cell and when you see a cell bubbling up like that that's a process called apoptosis and a t cell can kill over and over again so one of the things that my lab is doing is figuring out alternative ways to uh and harness the t cell immune the the function of t cells to kill tumor cells and either add to or improve the existing immunotherapies or become novel like novel therapy in and of its own okay uh we had some comments before that some of you couldn't see me when i was on screen trust me if that's the case you're not missing anything um linda thank you let's i have a couple questions and again if people have questions please put them in the q a box at the bottom but let's start with the basics right so you just showed a video which was great with t cells killing immune cells it looks so fantastic why don't our bodies do that already how how are the cancer cells avoiding our t cells now well that actually is the topic of discussion that we'll just follow by jennifer hope she is going to tell you exactly what happens to t cells in the context of cancer which makes them unable to respond and how the immune checkpoint blockade specifically can reinvigorate the immune system so in essence she as jennifer will explain to you the t cells try to kill the tumor cells the tumor cells can mutate and not be recognized by the immune system again uh and the other thing happens is they get worn out in essence they get tired and they can't function so those are the two ways that the immune system is usurped by the cancer either immune escape it's called or a t-cell exhaustion thank you and when i introduce jenna i will apologize for trying to usurp her uh her talk with my question uh we do have a question from the audience about uh nutrition and does a patient's nutrition make a difference in how their body responds to immunotherapy well immunotherapy is is actually one would need to know is not a simple treatment that doesn't have side effects it has profound side effects because you're unleashing the immune system when you take the breaks off so an individual can feel quite ill potentially even as well as on chemotherapy because you're really disrupting the body's homeostasis so anything a person can do to maintain their health during the process of treatment which would include good nutrition getting enough rest all of those things are absolutely critically important and there are there is a whole school of uh thought that if you're under if you have cancer and if you're undergoing treatment it is absolutely critical to maintain good nutrition so the idea of unleashing the immune system it seems to me that that might put someone in danger of developing let's say an autoimmune disease so it's important i would imagine to find that balance between energizing our immune systems but not letting it run uh rampant uh and and killing the healthy parts of our body right so it's unfortunate that autoimmunity which is the body's immune system to attacking its own cells and tissues does is a side effect of immunotherapy particularly the immune checkpoint blockades which are not specific to a particular tissue and what happens then is actually the patients are monitored carefully for signs of autoimmunity and inflammation and those are at the moment controllable or most these are called adverse events and they are definitely part of immunotherapy and most clinicians feel that treatments with things like steroids or other things that dampen inflammation are able to make the treatments manageable for the patients so that you can continue on the treatment it is true that the regimen's different for the different monoclonal antibodies and the anti-ctla 4 is very toxic so it's only given once or twice whereas the anti-pd1 treatment is less so and people receive multiple doses at uh at like every two three week intervals because it's much better tolerated so these things are actually very empirical uh in terms of what the doctor and the clinician are evaluating and they make changes it can make changes and do make changes depending on how well a patient was tolerating the therapy but autoimmunity so far has been with the currently available treatments has been manageable for most patients by standard anti-inflammatory drugs great thank you linda we're going to move on now to keep things moving but we'll bring you back at the end for other questions and so now i'd like to introduce dr jenna hope jenna again i'm sorry for jumping the gun with your presentation with my question to linda jenna is an american cancer society post-doctoral fellow in dr bradley's lab at sanford bernard previous also within the aging cancer and immuno oncology program and we'd like to thank the american cancer society for supporting her fellowship her research interests are centered on discovering new ways by which we can use our immune system to fight off cancer and infection dr hope the zoom room is yours thank you joe and it's not a problem at all it's an excellent question in terms of you know why can't our t-cells necessarily function the way that we would want them to so i'm super excited to share that with you all it's really a pleasure to be here today with everyone and to really just you know especially linda and dennis and the opportunity to share with you all what it is that we are interested in when we're talking about cancer and particularly cancer immunotherapy i'm just going to bring up my mouse here so when we talk about the immune response to cancer as linda was speaking about really in in linda's lab what we're focusing on are t cell responses and in particular we're talking about the abilities of these t cells to really go after and directly kill tumor cells and actually joe you brought up a great analogy in the beginning and you didn't even know i was going to talk about it but i like to think about this in comparison to influenza all the time so as you can imagine this whole process of us and ourselves our immune system fighting against cancer requires energy and the analogy i like to think of is if we're going to the gym for a workout or going outside for a run and so our immune system is pretty well developed in the respect that if we see an infection such as a viral infection like influenza our t cells can fight that off it's basically akin to us going out there with or without some training and being able to run a mile or maybe even a 5k we're going to be tired at the end of it but we can handle it and when our t cells or our immune system is facing a viral infection like influenza as you suggested they can get to that finish line they can kill all of the virally infected cells but when we're talking about cancer this is more like going out there and trying to run a marathon without any of the specialized training that we know marathon runners need to take this costs ourselves so much energy that many of them become exhausted as linda talked about that's an actual term that we use to describe these cells they become exhausted and many of them cannot make it to that finish line and so that's really the problem that we're facing but it's even more than that right so our t cells they're racing an uphill battle so it's not just a marathon anymore right but now it's a marathon that you're having to run up this hill and in particular it's not just even that so our t cells often times once they get into the actual site of a tumor in the beginning it's like running that 5k they're full of energy they're there to attack and kill the tumor cells and they do a really good job about it but the tumor cells like linda alluded to are also trying to out compete the t cells in our immune system and they have this special ability to really change the whole environment to make it such that it's not good for our t-cells or our immune cells and so what we've been working on in the brownie lab is this immunotherapy target it's a novel one that we've been really excited about for the last several years and what we have found is that our t cells express this target pretty much all the time but when they get activated meaning when they see a virally infected cell or a tumor cell they start to express even more of this target just kind of hangs out on the surface of this cell and so we've really been studying what it does and what we found is that this target has the ability to basically bump into other things going on in the tumor micro environment and as it does that it's basically adding extra weight to our t cells so now not just is it a marathon not just as an uphill battle but we're adding on weight to that backpack and our t-cells are having to carry it with them so you can understand how that could take a lot of energy and really exhaust our t-cells even faster but the really great news and the exciting research that we found is that we can actually block this target we have models where we've removed this target from the surface of t cells and by doing so we're really limiting or preventing the development of that exhaustion of the t cells not only that but we're giving them this extra boost of energy they're able to get up the hill faster and what's really important is that we have found in our lab that targeting this particular target on t cells helps us to prove to limit growth of tumors that currently resistance to the checkpoint blockades that are available so that's really important because we don't fully understand why some patients respond really well to current therapies but why many of these patients don't respond and so we want to make sure that there's a lot of different options out there for patients so that if they can't respond to a current therapy maybe this new therapy is instead a different answer for them or in some cases maybe we can combine it and by that combination help to target those tumors that are really difficult to treat currently so that's been the focus we find that by targeting this particular molecule on the surface of our t cells we're really unleashing that immune system we're taking away the break and giving ourselves that extra burst so that they can fight that fight that fight and cross the finish line thank you jenna uh we have a bunch of questions here but let me start with this because cancer and viruses they can evolve and they can change and so um how are our t cells are they able to adapt to that evolution or does that help the cancer sort of hide from our immune systems and continue to to hurt us well the cool thing about t cells without going into too much detail is that t cells really recognize the guts of something if you will so our immune system is really diverse it's made up of a lot of different cell types and each different cell type has a very important role to play in targeting different things so when we think about a virus infection like you talked about mutations of viruses oftentimes we're first thinking about surface changes right that's going to be handled by a totally different type of immune cell a b cell and antibody responses our t cells are looking at the inside of the virus that is less likely to change when we're talking about a virus when it comes to tumors the biggest difficulty our immune system faces is the fact like you know was alluded to earlier there are normal cells that something has mutated and it's again that balance between a strong immune response and prevention of autoimmunity that we want to maintain that fine balance that we don't attack normal healthy cells so if a tumor mutates in such a way that it's not recognized as a damaged cell then it can evade a t cell response and so it's you know i'm not sure if that fully addresses your question but that's one of the difficulties that our t-cell faces is making sure that it can recognize it but also recognize that it's different enough that it needs to be killed so does that mean we may need to do i know for example car t therapy is sort of engineering t cells to recognize proteins et cetera markers on tumors do we need to do some combination perhaps of that plus the checkpoint inhibitors to be able to to do for example like a vaccine that would be a fantastic approach the limitation is we have to know what the target is and in some cases we don't know what it is the t cell is recognizing so there's a lot of work going into in general in the field with neoantogens that's a term that we give for these new molecules that pop up on tumor cells that our t-cells can recognize as being what we call non-self so it's different than what our normal body would express but in order for our car t cell to work we have to know what the target is and not just do we have to know what the target is but that's one of the dangers of the car t cells too we have to make sure that it's specific that's why for example with leukemias okay sorry i think we lost jenna for a second um okay so let's jenna you froze so we have some good questions for you though so hopefully we will get you back and in the meantime let's go with dr dennis otero dennis is a staff scientist and project manager manager in dr bradley's lab and his interest revolves around the discovery of biologics which can regulate the immune system to fight infectious disease and cancer or to prevent autoimmunity dr otero thank you for joining us today please go ahead thank you i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen now thank you for the introduction now what i am here for is to tell you what happens next or where do we go from here now in linda's lab i actually wear two hats one i am a staff scientist a research scientist that conducts research and performs experiments and i am involved in many of the projects within the lab lending my expertise to much of those projects but what i also am is a project manager and what i do is manage multiple projects in translational science so what is translational science so much of what we do at universities and research institutes is called basic science and that is we're trying to ask the how questions and the why questions and come up with answers to those every once in a while we'll have discoveries like our target that jenna mentioned earlier that have a direct relation to human disease in which case we want to translate our discoveries into maybe new therapies for that human disease so what usually happens is after we publish our discovery pharmaceutical companies will read those manuscripts and take those ideas and try to make drugs out of them what we're trying to do here at svp is actually take those discoveries that we made ourselves and carry them to the clinic kind of a bench to the bedside uh type of structure so like jenna said we have a target now and we've done our basic research most of our basic research happens in mice models because mice have a very similar immune response as humans but now we need to translate that over to human immunology in which case we have to start studying patient samples so as project manager and what i need to do is collaborate with clinicians doctors in the clinic who work on human patients and obtain the tumors cells and patients t cells from the blood from those patients and then we can then try to associate our target see if our target in the human cells behaves the same way as mass cells now we are currently undergoing that as well as developing therapeutics for that our target so since this is a protein that is expressed on the surface of the t cell is uh really we will be able to generate antibodies towards that protein and try to block our target so right now we have collaborations with biotech company to produce antibodies they have dozens of antibodies currently towards our target that we will start testing for the ability to bind the target cells and to block that target molecule from that point on everything becomes a little more complicated we have to start clinical trials which evaluate safety and the toxicity of our our compounds that we develop there are companies that we will collaborate with in order to do those as well we will then start to evaluate efficacy of our product as well and that will be going back to the clinic going back to the doctors in the clinic and collaborating with them to start clinical trials to evaluate efficacy and once we have a molecule that we think is working as well as it can then we can go to our next phase and start comparing that molecule to what's already being done in the clinic to treat those cancers and that's how we go from starting out with basic science and then translating it to human disease dennis that's that's really interesting and thank you for for sharing that with us um how often do things sort of you know they work in the lab they work in a mouse but then it doesn't always translate to uh to a human things sort of fall out of those those trials it's is that a high percentage a low percentage i'd say it's probably a high percentage we cannot cannot be sure because like i said we're not a drug company so we don't know how what the failure rate of those is but yes definitely uh not everything translates going from mouse to human there of course are main major differences but the mice are similar enough that we can do studies and gain a lot of insight from them uh we have a question from our audience is the phase one trial only with human blood and not people the phase one trials i believe are they start off with the safety of the toxicity studies are with animals so they'll i think they will start with closely related species monkeys and then maybe apes got it okay let's bring everybody back because we have a bunch of questions we are very happy that we have uh jenna back um jenna leaving us i just want to say uh and congratulations are almost in order jenna is uh i'm going to say days away from giving birth to your first child so i'm glad that it was just computer freezing and not having to rush to the hospital in labor sorry about that no no no no that's quite all right that's quite all right so um let me throw this question out and for probably either linda or jenna how is the correct immunotherapy identified for patients linda do you want to take this i can take part of it maybe you can jump in if i miss something well actually there's not a good way i we jenna and i worked with a melanoma skin cancer oncologist and one day i was talking about the project with him and a young oncology fellow comes into the office and asks about starting a new drug and it was a it's a monoclonal antibody to a target that i'm aware of and i said oh how how did you make a decision to start the patient on that that treatment and he said well we have a trial we don't know and so there's a huge effort for every one of these uh checkpoint blockade uh agents that and there are hundreds of trials if anyone wants to check this out go on trials.gov and everyone is looking for biomarkers that's what they call a marker that should suggest or would would be correlated with a good response so for pd-1 which you know the presence of pd-1 is necessary for anti-pd-1 to work also the pd the ligand or the molecule that p1 interacts pdl1 for pdl pd1 ligand uh people have looked well is that going to be something that marks a tumor that's going to be responsive unfortunately the answer is no and that there is now and nowadays a really i would call system-wide approaches bioinformatic approaches that take tumors and interrogate hundreds of proteins and genes within cells of the tumor to see what if there are any collection of proteins or genes that could be correlated or indicative of a patient's response to an immunotherapy at present there really isn't a really good biomarker for any of these treatments and unfortunately for patients whose whose tumors are very responsive such as melanoma patients there's an estimated 80 percent of patients that initially respond but less than 20 percent have what they call a durable response meaning a response that goes out at least five years so the immune system also becomes refractory to treatments which is yet another problem so at the moment uh i think that the approaches that are being widely accepted as potentially valuable for improving patient outcomes are to combine various therapies and try to then prevent this you know the loss of responsiveness so come in with a new agent at a later time that that blocks a different pathway and one of the interesting things that our field is very very focused on right now is there are multiple inhibitory pathways in the immune system and the reason is it's so important to tightly control immune responses that all of those are acting as checks and balances and often at different times during an immune response so the big problem is we're looking for biomarkers and there are publications that that are coming out very often now with these large bioinformatic approaches to do multiple gene analyses multiple hundreds of thousands of gene analyses hundreds of thousands of protein analyses to try to come up with networks or groups of proteins or groups of gene that might help us one day know exactly what and and every patient is different unfortunately so you've probably heard of personalized medicine and at that this point that is where things will go we will actually take a slice of the patient's tumor and do these advanced technologies to look at not just one or two biomarkers but a constellation of things and i think we will get there but it's it's a big challenge the only thing i'd like to add to that is just the fact that again remember we're not clinicians we're we're scientists we're looking at the from the literature side but you know keeping in mind that the physicians who are making these decisions you know a partial response could mean the difference of a couple more months or a year for that patient and that could be a huge change in their their quality of life or what they want to do and that's why it's such an important conversation for that patient to have with their clinician who knows their individual case history and everything else but as linda says it's there's not a one size fits all it's important for everyone i think to understand how linda mentioned like cancer is multifaceted you know it's not just is it a collection of 200 different diseases but even if you have melanoma there's different subtypes and every patient basically becomes a unique case so that's why it's just so important to have those important conversations with your physician and make the best judgment call for yourself thank you we've gotten a couple questions from people who have said that they themselves may have autoimmune diseases and wondering how safe immune therapy immunotherapy would be for someone who already has or has had autoimmune diseases um i'll i'll take this because i have an autoimmune disease and if i had cancer i wouldn't personally have any concerns about taking an immunotherapy um understanding you know my particular disease and also you know what these immuno immunotherapies do the monoclonal antibody treatments specifically you know if you remove treatment it removes the effect right so it's a transient treatment and um again it's it's gonna depend on a person's specific case but an autoimmune disease for the most part is really an overreaction of the immune system or a reaction that shouldn't be taking place that could potentially help you right if you have some extra inflammatory response going on that might rev up something else it's going to depend on the specific disease but at least personally speaking that wouldn't bother me at all got it there was a question here i'm going to read it specifically with the immunotherapy research you are performing be generally similar to the treatment performed today for plaque psoriasis and targeting il17a linda maybe so il-17a is what's called this inflammatory cytokine so it's a protein that's produced by uh immune cells including t cells and some specific subsets of t cells so the treatment that blocks isle 17a is blocking a secreted product a cellular secreted product the target that we're looking on is actually expressed on the cell surface so in that way they would be very different now one could also uh take an alternative approach and i don't know if this is the clinic again we're not clinicians but there is a receptor of course a protein that binds up il-17 a and you could block the il-17 receptor and that would be another approach so it's like there are a number of approach and that would be expressed on the cell surface i'm not at all sure whether there are any anti-17 drugs on the market but the il-17 uh drug 17-a drug i think has been very successful for psoriasis to my knowledge dennis may know better he's worked more on that side of things yeah so i just add that these are opposites right in our case with the cancer we're trying to boost the immune response in order to clear the cancer on the autoimmune side we're trying to dampen the immune response that's what those entire l17 they're dampening the inflammation to block the plaque psoriasis um a couple questions in general about things that might affect the immune system uh and or cancer and again i know we're not clinicians but i will ask um i'll bring a couple of these up and perhaps we can we can tackle them if we feel like we are uh we are expert enough and if we feel like we're not then the answer will be discuss with your physician um how does the intake of alcohol affect cancer well i i don't know that i know that it can cause cancer as far as i know but i it's not something i'm familiar with okay and as we have said on other things for anybody asking these questions everything in moderation right right there you go okay um the effect of fasting because we've talked about that and uh promoting autophagy and and things like that what effect does that have on our immune system's function so that's actually really interesting um there's a couple different you know fields going on and there's a big difference between chronic fasting and chronic caloric restriction to the point of you know malnutrition and that has a really negative effect on the immune system as you can imagine whereas there's been some studies that have shown that intermittent fasting can help promote immune system regeneration um but to my knowledge those studies have been looking at the immune responses as a whole not necessarily under the context of of cancer um i would imagine again you know we're talking about you know in in my section i was talking about how much energy our cells require to continually fight off virally infected cells or cancer cells you know we talk about when you have a cold make sure you stay hydrated make sure you try to eat you know broth or something to give yourself some nutrients there that i would not having seen any of these studies but i would imagine that you know potentially caloric restriction could be a downside in that case i haven't seen those studies though and i would imagine that the op opposite of that may be true as well and that's another question we have here about stress and weight and i would imagine that would we're talking about excess weight having on our t-cells ability to fight disease and and protect our body would that be would that be true i would imagine so i mean we we don't work with obese mice those model systems do exist um i'm not sure if you know dennis or linda you're you know aware of any studies looking at that well i'm so i serve on nih study panel which reviews grant applications and some of these types of study and it's for basic research so i'm not evaluating proposals for clinical trials but jenna mentioned earlier on the flu and there was a group that was very interested in how obesity would impact the immune response to flu and it had a very profound impact and this particular group was interested in determining since uh obesity seems to be a risk factor for the coronavirus disease that whether or not this would impact the immune system as well it's also important to realize that i think as an immunologist we view obesity as a chronic inflammatory disease so they and there actually are t cells that can be found within fat tissues and it is without question that obesity does impact immune responses but i'm primarily aware of these this like particularly this one set of studies because i was interested in the that was part of the grant review and i would say yes being a healthy weight is going to be important at any point when you get an infection or cancer and it is a risk factor that is can impair the immune system and then a question uh specifically what type of immunotherapy is ivig so that would be i'm assuming intravenous immunoglobulin yes that's going to be basically a replacement therapy typically somebody who has a b-cell deficiency um usually a primary immunodeficiency so something genetically has happened in them that makes them unable to produce those types of cells that make those antibodies that help protect us against infection um and then actually that's i think where i got cut off before but that's something that you can do in replacement therapy for car t cells with leukemias is that not only does that kill all the cancer cells but it kills all your healthy b cells too and so ivig would be a replacement therapy then to basically infuse these antibodies into your system and it gives you you know an intermediate protection for i believe a month is about standard for ivig well thank you all thank you to all of our presenters and thank you all for joining us as always our presentation was recorded and we'll be mail emailed to everyone who registered and we are very very appreciative that you take an active role in learning about our research please feel free to share it with others who might be interested in this work you can learn about our research at future insights events and we're going to put up a slide here it is of a list of those upcoming events in the next few months and if you'd like to learn more about or contribute to any of our research please contact me at either the email or phone number on your screen i'd be happy to chat with you about how you can help our scientists do this amazing work thank you again for attending and again please feel free to share with all of your friends and colleagues and thank you for your interest in our science at sanford burnham previous have a great day

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Length: 50min 19sec (3019 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2021