Our initial understanding of immunotherapy is giving rise to personalized cancer treatments. The path forward for cancer treatment in the future is an area of study by Dr. Donald Lawrence at Harvard Medical School and as Clinical Director for the Center for Melanoma at Massachusetts General Hospital.

We now know that cancer is a disease of genes. Dr. Lawrence will review our knowledge about how genes function leapt forward after the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA due to pioneering studies by James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin in the 1950’s which led to the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine. From this discovery, only 20 years lapsed before the Human Genome Project was born. Its successful conclusion mapped the entire human genome giving us a complete catalog of the genetic variants that drive or at least are different between normal cells and cancer cells. This catalog, and the research that uses the catalog, has given rise to the initial development of new forms personalized medicine. To date, the same cancer therapy drug is given to all patients with the same cancer without doctors knowing with certainty whether the treatment will be effective. We are now at the beginning of understanding the “why” cancer therapies work at the cellular level on some patients and not others. Included in this knowledge is a rudimentary understanding of the major influence the patient’s own gut microbiome plays in successful cancer treatment.

Dr. Donald Lawrence’s research focuses on the development of novel therapies for melanoma. He leads numerous melanoma clinical trials within the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. He is the principal investigator of two National Cancer Institute-funded, multicenter clinical trials evaluating targeted cancers selected by prospective genotypic analysis. He is a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, and the Clinical Director of the Center for Melanoma at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center.

The library's “Science and Society - Making Sense of the World Around Us” lecture series is co-organized and moderated by Fred Dylla, Executive Director Emeritus of the American Institute of Physics and author of Scientific Journeys, Linda Dylla, former public information officer at the Jefferson Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy, and Colin Norman, the former News Editor at Science.

NOTE: this meeting is being conducted through Zoom. You MUST REGISTER to receive instructions for joining the meeting.

If you have need assistance with registration or getting your Zoom invitation, please email us.

Basic written instructions for using Zoom may be found here and a brief video tutorial may be found here. Closed captioning is available for all our sessions. Information on enabling closed captioning in Zoom may be found here.