One of the Country’s Largest Cancer Immunotherapy Programs at Roswell Park

Whether your patient is newly diagnosed with cancer or is in remission, Roswell Park’s Center for Immunotherapy is making discoveries every day to harness the power of a person’s immune system to help them fight their cancer.

As one of only 28 elite universities and cancer centers in the United States in the Cancer Immunotherapy Trial Network, we offer your patients options beyond standard cancer treatments through innovative therapies and clinical trials to prevent cancer from recurring or by stopping it completely.

For decades, a cancer patient’s only hope was through the modalities of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Now our immunotherapy advances are providing some of the first new possibilities in cancer care and cure.

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  New vaccines, like Roswell’s SurVaxM glioblastoma vaccine, dendritic cell therapies, as well as the CIMAvax lung cancer vaccine.

• Cellular Therapy that uses living cells instead of drugs to control or destroy cancer cells. In one method, called adoptive cellular therapy, our physicians collect cancer-killing T cells from the patient’s blood, re-engineer and multiply them in the laboratory, and return them to the patient to jump-start the immune system’s attack against the disease.

Roswell Park is one of the few places in the world with the capacity to manufacture these cells, which has helped us recruit some of the field’s brightest minds and has strengthened our international leadership in adoptive cellular therapies, including chimeric antigen receptor T-Cell (CAR T-cell) and tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapies. It makes Roswell Park a destination for patients throughout the world looking for new options for their treatment.

For some patients, these advances are already gamechangers. Now, they come in for a monthly injection, cell transfusion, or even take a daily pill, that potentially controls their disease or sends it into remission. Just as importantly, they can do it without the damaging side effects of radiation and chemotherapy.

What’s next?

Roswell Park is developing an extensive data bank to capture and analyze biospecimens, biomarkers and other information that researchers and clinicians at Roswell Park and around the country can use to propose new therapies for patients and drive new research.

An International Meeting of the Minds

In December 2019, Roswell Park’s Immunotherapy Program leaders gathered in Italy with other world leaders to focus on the latest research in cancer immunotherapy and treatment of melanoma. The tandem Immunotherapy Bridge and Melanoma Bridge meetings enabled important exchanges led by some of the world’s most esteemed experts in the field.

Because new therapies and clinical evidence are emerging so quickly, these conversations provided an opportunity to bring together some of the best minds in this field to help raise and address the most pressing questions.

Dr. Igor Puzanov, Chief of Melanoma and Director of the Early-Phase Clinical Trials program at Roswell Park, Kunle Odunsi, MD, PhD, FRCOG, FACOG, Deputy Director, Chair of Gynecologic Oncology and Executive Director of the Center for Immunotherapy at Roswell Park, and Marc Ernstoff, MD, the Katherine Anne Gioia Chair of Medicine at Roswell Park, collectively led more than a dozen sessions across the two meetings.