The Value of Immunotherapy in Spinal Oncology
In This Video
- Joseph H. Schwab, MD, is the chief of Orthopaedic Spine Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at Harvard Medical School
- Here, he discusses the field of cancer immunology, which is guiding much of the orthopedic research at Mass General, and his research on human leukocyte antigen (HLA) expression on cell surfaces
- His team is on the hunt for surface targets on cancer cells for monoclonal antibody-based or T-cell-based immunotherapies
Joseph Schwab, MD, is the chief of the Orthopaedic Spine Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. In this video, he discusses the field of cancer immunotherapy, which is guiding a lot of the orthopedic research at Mass General, and his research on human leukocyte antigen (HLA) expression on cell surfaces. His team is on the hunt for surface targets on cancer cells for monoclonal antibody-based or T-cell-based therapies.
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Transcript
What's really exciting to me right now is what's going on in immunology. The field of cancer immunology has really exploded and is guiding a lot of the research that we're doing.
We're looking at things like HLA expression on the surface of cells and we're finding that many of our sarcomas and bone tumors lack HLA expression, particularly those tumors that are more aggressive. And they seem to be circumventing the immune system.
So that's an exciting area for us right now, learning which ones, which tumors don't express HLA.
The other aspect of our immune work—we're looking for targets. We're looking for surface targets on our cancer cells that might be a target for immunotherapy. Whether that's monoclonal antibody-based or T-cell-based. And so that is another important aspect of what we're doing and I think very exciting for the future of bone tumors.
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