Immunotherapy

A major current focus of our laboratory is the development of strategies to combine immune adjuvants and thermal or chemotherapy.  We find that such strategies can create a curative systemic response in aggressive cancers and we are working to characterize the mechanisms and enhance the efficacy.  We are currently evaluating these strategies in pre-clinical models of breast and pancreatic cancer.  We find that the immunosuppressive components of cancers (such as the T-regulatory cells shown on the left) can be diminished with an effective protocol.