Top 10 Things Patients Need to Know about Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy has made incredible progress against cancer in the past decade, but there’s still work to be done to ensure every patient benefits. Recent advances in exciting research areas offer hope and evidence that we’re on the right path, but with so much information it can be hard to keep track. For the tenth anniversary of Cancer Immunotherapy Month, we highlight the top 10 things patients need to know about immunotherapy.

In this webinar for patients and caregivers, Dr. Laurie Glimcher, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, and CRI ImmunoAdvocate Sunshine Pegues share important information about immunotherapy’s past, the current state of this medicine, and its potential future. They discuss issues covering the science of immunotherapy as well as the immunotherapy patient experience, including:

• Who can be treated with immunotherapy?
• What factors affect cancer development and immunotherapy responses?
• Where patients can find immunotherapy clinical trials?
• How are vaccines used against cancer?
• And live questions from the audience!

Laurie H. Glimcher, MD, a longtime member of the CRI Scientific Advisory Council, is the president and CEO of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, as well as the director of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center and the Richard and Susan Smith Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. During her career as a distinguished immunologist that has seen her publish more than 350 papers, Dr. Glimcher has been inducted into many prestigious organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has also received numerous awards, including the American Association of Immunologists Lifetime Achievement Award and the L’Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science, and CRI’s William B. Coley Award.

In 2011, Sunshine Pegues was diagnosed with stage 4 non-small cell lung cancer. Standard treatment at the time was chemotherapy followed by 35 days of radiation, which burned the skin on her neck and left her in more pain and skeptical about the advice of her health care team. She moved back to her hometown, Seattle, where she enrolled in two clinical trials. The second trial tested nivolumab (Opdivo), an anti-PD-1 immunotherapy, which stopped her cancer from progressing and eventually, caused it to become inactive.

The Cancer Immunotherapy and You™ webinar series is produced by the Cancer Research Institute and is hosted by our assistant director of scientific content, Arthur N. Brodsky, PhD The 2022 series is made possible with generous support from Bristol Myers Squibb with additional support from Alkermes, BioCanRx, and Lilly Oncology.

Browse our Cancer Immunotherapy and You Webinar Series playlist on YouTube or visit the Webinars page on our website to see other webinars in this series.