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Cancer research in the immunotherapy program

• Northwestern Mutual Translational Laboratory
• Vince Lombardi Gene Therapy Laboratories

Northwestern Mutual Translational Laboratory

The focus of this laboratory is to facilitate the use of new biological therapies for patients with cancer.

• Innovative technologies and therapeutic agents are brought to this laboratory through collaboration with other labs around the world.
• Methods of producing new clinical-grade biological agents are optimized.
• Therapeutic agents are combined to determine whether the combination has stronger anti-tumor effects compared to the single agents.
• When a new therapy is developed, the staff of this laboratory facilitate transfer of the procedures to the clinical cell production laboratory.
• Experimental techniques to monitor the response of a patient's immune system to biological therapy are developed.

Selected recent abstracts:

Garlie NK, Siebenlist R, Aoys E. 2003. Generation of Clinical-Grade Dendritic Cells (DC) From CD14+ Peripheral Blood Monocytes in a Closed-System. ASCO Proceedings, 22:184.

Garlie NK, Aoys E. 2002. Optimization of antigen load schedule to generate mature DCs. J Immunother 25:S7

Vince Lombardi Gene Therapy Laboratories

Developing therapies for metastatic cancer: Antigen–specific immunotherapy using genetically engineered dendritic cells

Treatments that activate the patient's immune response to fight cancer more effectively are currently being tested in clinical trials. Our gene therapy research group is developing new and potentially powerful dendritic-cell based genetic vaccines for cancer treatment in the future.

While vaccines have been used successfully against bacteria and viruses for diseases such as polio, it has been very difficult to build an effective attack against tumor cells that have continued to grow and have escaped the body's surveillance system. Our scientific approach combines the latest technologies of molecular biology, immunology and gene therapy in order to develop treatments that can generate a sustained, efficient and selective attack on tumor cells but not on the normal cells of the body.