Michail Sitkovsky is a professor, the director of the New England Inflammation and Tissue Protection Institute, and Eleanor W. Black Chair of Immunophysiology and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology.
There is an acute need to prevent cancer and to improve tumor rejection, thereby improving patient survival. Using a patient’s own anti-tumor T lymphocytes represents an optimal complementary cancer treatment strategy since chemo- and radiation therapies often result in eventual resistance of tumors and resulting relapses. Advances in immunotherapy may also help prevent cancer stem cells that survive conventional therapy from evading the immune system and re-populating the tumor.
Although cancer immunotherapy represents a promising approach, it has been largely ineffective for reasons that are unclear. To address these major unsolved medical problems, we are developing conceptually novel strategies of cancer prevention and cancer immunotherapy. Our aim is to eliminate the powerful hypoxia-adenosinergic mechanism that protects tumors by inhibiting incoming anti-tumor T killer cells near or within tumors. This mechanism is now recognized as a major obstacle in the tumor microenvironment, and it negates recent promising advances in cancer immunotherapy.