Engineering the Next Wave of Immunotherapy

The 19th Annual Koch Institute Summer Symposium on June 12, 2020 at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium will focus on cancer immunotherapy.

Cancer immunotherapy has revolutionized the landscape of cancer treatment, our thinking of tumor biology and clinical practice. Following the groundbreaking successes of checkpoint blockade therapy and CAR T cell therapy, culminating in multiple FDA-approved treatments and the awarding of the 2018  Nobel Prize in Medicine to Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo, the field is currently at a critical juncture.

While checkpoint blockade therapy has demonstrated that the immune system can be harnessed to fight cancer,  the next generation of treatments will require us to understand what causes resistance in non-responders, how this can be overcome, and how these issues are best addressed clinically. Discussing these questions will be at the core of this symposium as we move towards our ultimate goal to increase the number of patients benefiting from immunotherapy. 

Session Speakers

Targeting T Cells
Rafi Ahmed, Michael Dougan, Chris Love

Thinking Beyond T Cells
Angelika Amon, Yasemine Belkaid, Stefani Spranger

Engineering Clinical Translation  
Nina Bhardwaj, Chris Garcia

Panel Discussion: Clinical Translation: A Real Life Perspective

Daniel Chen, Howard Kaufman, Kimberly Schaefer-Weaver
Moderator: Steven Silverstein