The future of immunotherapy research at MSK

A revolution is underway in oncology, and in medicine more broadly.

Immunotherapies are marshalling the power of the human immune system against cancer to augment or even sometimes replace traditional treatments — and they are starting to make inroads against autoimmune diseases, infections, and other disorders.

Immunotherapy research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) dates back to the 1890s, when Dr. William Coley — now hailed as the “father of immunotherapy” — began treating cancer patients with a mixture of heat-killed bacteria known as “Coley’s toxins” after noticing that patients with bacterial infections sometimes saw their tumors shrink.

Over many decades, MSK has continued to pioneer research in the field — from fundamental biological discoveries about the immune system to engineering new cell therapies to practice-changing clinical trials.

MSK has played a leading role in many of the biggest immunotherapy breakthroughs of the past decade and a half, including the development of immune checkpoint inhibitors, CAR T cell therapy, and therapeutic cancer vaccines.

Breakthroughs like these often start with fundamental biological discoveries made in the laboratory. These insights are then developed into new therapeutic strategies. Novel approaches first undergo early clinical testing, then full clinical trials, and, once proved effective, are added into the arsenal of cancer treatments available to patients worldwide.

There are numerous recent examples at MSK that span this entire spectrum of laboratory and clinical research:

• A groundbreaking MSK study showed immune checkpoint inhibitors alone could replace surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy for some patients with mismatch repair-deficient solid tumors, helping them avoid the harsh side effects of those treatments.
• Recent work on cancer vaccines shows promising results that the immune system can be educated to turn against some of the deadliest cancers, such as pancreatic tumors.
• Several new treatment strategies from the lab show patients’ own immune cells or even donor immune cells could be genetically engineered to last longer and be more effective when given as a cancer treatment.
• And MSK researchers are revealing how a newly discovered immune cell trains the immune system during childhood to ignore harmless proteins found in food — a discovery that has direct implications for food allergies and potentially for early childhood cancers.

In keeping with MSK’s ongoing commitment to this burgeoning discipline, the Immuno-Oncology Service, part of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program, was elevated into a stand-alone Immuno-Oncology Program in 2025.

The research program’s goal is to continue and expand upon the vital work of understanding how cancer evades the immune system in the laboratory — and to develop those findings, step by step, to make immunotherapies effective for more patients and against more types of cancer.

We recently sat down with Andy Minn, MD, PhD, the program’s inaugural chair, to learn more about him, his vision for the program, and what it means for patients.

So, this is actually a return to MSK for you. Tell us a little about your scientific journey.

In college, I had a fantastic instructor at the University of Chicago, Dr. Jose Quintans, who taught immunology. And he also happened to be the director of the MD-PhD program. I knew I wanted to be a doctor, but he inspired me down the path to being a physician-scientist — someone who not only treats patients, but who works to better understand disease so that we can develop new therapies.

In Chicago, I worked in the research laboratory of Dr. Craig Thompson — who would later become president and CEO of MSK. But for as much as I loved immunology, very few people at that time thought immunotherapy could be an effective cancer treatment. So, instead of going against the wisdom of the time as a young scientist, I ended up focusing on understanding why cancers can be so hard to kill using more conventional cancer therapies, like radiation and chemotherapy.

Because of those scientific interests, as a physician I decided to become a radiation oncologist, a cancer doctor who uses radiation to treat cancer. I really love the discipline. You have a lot of contact with patients. They usually come after they’ve received a diagnosis, and you help people through the process of figuring out what comes next. I found that aspect very rewarding. Sometimes we can offer them definitive treatment, meaning the intent is to cure their cancer. However, many times we can only offer palliative care — a reminder of the need for more research.

I did my medical residency in radiation oncology at MSK and continued my postdoctoral scientific training in the lab of Dr. Joan Massagué, who is now Director of MSK’s Sloan Kettering Institute, where I studied another important topic in cancer — how cancers metastasize, or spread, to different parts of the body. From there I returned to the University of Chicago before ultimately moving to the University of Pennsylvania.

So how did you make your way back to studying the immune system and cancer?

Believe it or not, it started with a conversation in an elevator while I was at Penn. My colleague said to me, “Hey, you’re a radiation oncologist. Now that we have these new immunotherapies called checkpoint inhibitors that are starting to have an impact on cancer patients, is it possible that we could use radiation to make them more effective?” And of course, I just jumped at the opportunity to study whether that was the case, realizing immunotherapies might finally be effective against cancer. That was really my re-entry into immuno-oncology.

At Penn, my curiosity evolved into bigger questions about how we can make immunotherapy work better and for more cancer patients. My lab began observing that chronic inflammation by cytokines, like interferons, can make cancers resistant to elimination by the immune system. This became quite complicated and even counterintuitive because while chronic inflammation was becoming clearly important in causing resistance to immunotherapy, it is well-established that short-lived, or acute, inflammation is needed in order to activate an immune response against cancer. It’s a classic double-edged sword.

So, my lab built a program to understand how we can activate “good” inflammation using therapies like immune checkpoint blockade, CAR T cells, or radiation — while also preventing the “bad” chronic inflammation using drugs for autoimmunity, and by discovering the tricks cancer cells use to perpetuate chronic inflammation and evade the immune system.

Although my lab was very excited about what we set out to accomplish, it was clear the best way to deal with complex biology and the urgency to improve immunotherapy for patients is through team science and working with outstanding and equally motivated scientists and clinicians. At Penn, I was able to shift to that next level of collaboration and coordination when I became the Director of the Mark Foundation Center for Immunotherapy, Immune Signaling, and Radiation.

Tell us about your vision for MSK’s Immuno-Oncology Program.

First of all, I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity. At MSK, we have a program made up of world-class physician-scientists who are doing innovative, insightful research. And MSK has done amazing work to bring checkpoint inhibitors, CAR T cell therapy, cancer vaccines, and other immunotherapy treatments to patients.

Of course, there is a lot of room to innovate and expand. For example, CAR T cell therapy is good against some blood cancers, but not so good against solid tumors. Checkpoint inhibitors work really well in a subset of patients, but many patients have cancers that don’t respond. Or patients may respond to immunotherapy for a while, but then it stops working and their cancer comes back.

My experience tells me that the best way to tackle the challenges keeping us from curing all cancers in all patients using immunotherapy is through team science.

MSK has this amazing foundation to build upon where everyone shares the same mission: to end cancer for life. So, we can coalesce around translating discoveries from the lab to the clinic, learning from patients, and bringing those insights back to the lab to either refine or stimulate new explorations.

With this in mind, how can we streamline the connections between laboratory research and the clinic to make the process more efficient and effective? How can we take better advantage of synergies across the institution and better promote collaborations between scientists and clinical colleagues to advance exciting discoveries?

I believe that through this process, we will deliver the hope for meaningful and durable responses to immunotherapy for many more patients — the type of responses the immune system is meant to provide. And I can think of no better place than MSK to do this work of further unlocking immunotherapy’s potential.