A New Breed of Cancer Researcher

摘要

When Martin Pule landed a Fulbright scholarship 14 years ago to study at the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy in Baylor College of Medicine, he never anticipated that he would be working in one of the hottest fields of cancer research today: immuno-therapy. At Baylor, Pule began training in Malcolm Brenner's laboratory-one of the pioneers of engineered T-cell treatments. In 2008, Brenner's team published one of the first studies demonstrating that T cells could be taken from a patient with neuroblastoma, engineered to express tumor-specific receptors, and then administered back to the patient as a treatment. At the time most cancer researchers considered T-cell therapy a "fantastical and unrealistic thing to do," Pule recalls. It was "cumbersome and seemed a lot less feasible than treating patients with cancer-fighting antibodies." Fast-forward to 2014 and immuno-therapy is one of the most promising, novel ways to treat cancer to emerge in over a decade.