The tools for fighting various forms of cancers, until recently, have not changed much since the development of chemotherapy and radiation therapies decades ago. However, in the past decade immunotherapy has revolutionized the treatment of some forms of cancer by unleashing the human body’s own defense systems to fight cancer cells. Dr. Donald Lawrence was on the forefront of this development during the clinical trial stages of using immunotherapy for melanoma, a once almost uncurable form of skin cancer. Dr. Lawrence will describe this new form of treatment, how it works in the body, its role in cancer treatment today and what the future holds for the use of immunotherapy in many different cancers of the body.

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.

This talk is part of the Science and Society lecture series 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.

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