Immunotherapy: Using the Immune System to Fight Cancer

Your immune system has the ability to detect and kill cells that have started to transform into cancerous cells, but sometimes the cancer cells develop a mechanism to hide from your immune system. Join us for a talk with Stanford's Dr. Elena Sotillo and learn how scientists are alerting and hacking the immune system to fight cancer, the evolution of CAR T cell therapy, and how scientific discoveries lead to life changing therapies. Dr. Sotillo is a cellular and molecular biologist whose research is focused on how cancer cells evade immunotherapeutic treatments. She is the senior scientist in the laboratory of Dr. Crystal Mackall, Director of the Stanford Center for Cancer Cell Therapy (SCCT) and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Stanford (PICI). The Mackall laboratory is dedicated to the research, development and testing of genetically engineered immune cells to treat childhood cancers, and has developed several T cell-based therapies currently in clinical trials.