Timeline of Immunotherapy
1796: Edward Jenner conducts pioneering research in the field of vaccinations and develops the smallpox vaccine.
1957 1st bone marrow transplants reported by Don Thomas
1962: “Coley’s toxins were labeled as a “new drug” by the Food and Drug Administration.
1985 Lymphokine Activated Killer (LAK) cells induce regression of melanomas
430 BC: Intimations that if one survived a disease, they would be less susceptible to contracting it again
1893: American surgeon William Coley discovers that some of his patients with bacterial infection experience their tumors shrinking. Coley begins patient trials and treats cancer patients with a certain combination of bacteria called “Coley’s toxins.”
1960: Australian immunologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet and British biologist Peter Medawar win the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in the understanding of the immune system and using clonal selection to support Burnets Theory about antibody production.
1968 First successful Bone marrow transplant for Immunodeficiency by Bob Good
1987 Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes (TIL) induce regression of melanomas
1989 Eschaar invents a ‘chimeric antigen receptor’
1990 First application of ‘gene therapy’ in humans without toxicity
1999 Jesse Geisinger an 18 year old treated with gene therapy dies of toxicity -first person publicly identified as having died in a clinical trial for gene therapy
2000 AIDS receives CAR T cells, which persist for years without toxicity
2000 Immunotherapy in baby boys cured with bone therapy
2001 Lymphopenia induces elevations in homestasis cytokines support positive T cell responses
2002 Boys cured with gene therapy develop leukemia
2010 CD-19 CAR induces regression of lymphomas
2013: The Science magazine declares breakthrough of the year topic is Cancer Immunotherapy
2017 CD-19 CAR therapy FDA approved for B-ALL and diffuse larger B cell lymphoma
2005 Numerous CAR T cell trials with limited success
2012 Pharmaceutical companies invest in cell therapy
2014 Across several trials, 70-90% of children and young adults with leukemia refractory to all other therapies had complete disapperance of their leukemia within 28 days.
2018 Jim Allison and Takira Horyo Nobel Prize in Medicine - discover blocking a protein on T cells that acts as a brake on their activation, freeing the T cells to attack cancer. Develop an antibody to block the checkpoint protein CTLA-4 and demonstrate the success of the approach in experimental models. Work led to development of the first immune checkpoint inhibitor drug.