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Renowned scientists will work together to fight cancer

M.D. Anderson among 6 institutions chosen to advance immunotherapy under new alliance

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Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster Inc., is 
Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster Inc., is Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and five other institutions will collaborate to advance the development of cancer immunotherapy under a new alliance funded by the largest-ever contribution toward what's considered the great new hope to treat the dreaded disease.

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, is giving $250 million to create the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, a partnership of renowned scientists, clinicians and industry leaders who will attempt to better harness the body's defenses to attack malignant tumors. The institute's formation is being announced Wednesday in Los Angeles.

"We are at an inflection point in cancer research and now is the time to maximize immunotherapy's unique potential to transform all cancers into manageable diseases, saving millions of lives," Parker, 36, president of the Parker Foundation, said in a statement. "We believe the creation of a new funding and research model can overcome many of the obstacles that currently prevent research breakthroughs."

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The institute will bring together most of the top scientists in the field, including M.D. Anderson's Jim Allison and the University of Pennsylvania's Dr. Carl June. Both men have done pioneering work in immunotherapy, giving life to an area long considered a lost cause.

Jim Allison, whose ground breaking research enlisted the immune system to fight cancer, tosses his "Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences" prize in his MD Anderson Cancer Center lab. (Craig H. Hartley/For the Chronicle)
Jim Allison, whose ground breaking research enlisted the immune system to fight cancer, tosses his "Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences" prize in his MD Anderson Cancer Center lab. (Craig H. Hartley/For the Chronicle)Craig Hartley/Freelance

All told, the institute will include 300 immunotherapy researchers and 40 laboratories among its six leading cancer centers. Besides M.D. Anderson and Penn, the partnership includes Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City; the University of California, San Francisco; Stanford; and UCLA.

Allison, who co-discovered an immune system brake and developed a drug that removes it to unleash a patient's defenses to attack cancerous tumors, will direct the institute's research at Houston's M.D. Anderson. He said the emphasis on uniting people with different interests and expertise should yield key new insights and that its stable funding will allow the pursuit of risky projects.

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More Information

By the numbers

$250 million

Sean Parker's donation will create the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

300

Number of immunotherapy researchers at new institute.

40

Number of laboratories among six cancer centers.

The announcement comes two weeks after former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other philanthropists unveiled plans to give $125 million to the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University for an immunotherapy institute, and a few months after billionaire entrepreneur and oncologist Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong said he's developing a coalition to speed production of immunotherapies to fight cancer. Vice President Joe Biden's $1 billion national Moonshot effort, announced earlier this year, also is making immunotherapy a priority.

"There have been other cancer therapies that attracted significant funding, particularly from pharmaceutical companies, but I've never seen anything this big," said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society. "Given the number of good ideas that don't get funded, $250 million is huge."

Immunotherapy has great potential because it has produced lasting results in some patients with difficult-to-treat cancers - lung, melanoma, kidney cancer - that have spread to other organs, something few other treatments have achieved. Most notable, it appears to have successfully treated the cancer of former president Jimmy Carter, diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to his brain.

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But the therapy is still in its early stages of development. For all the buzz about its arrival as a new pillar of cancer treatment, immunotherapy is only helpful in a fraction of patients, mostly in just a few cancers. Scientists are still trying to understand why some patients get better but most don't.

It is those limitations that Parker Institute researchers want to overcome.

"The question is, how do you get immunotherapy on steroids?" said Dr. Jeffrey Bluestone, the immune system brake's co-discoverer and the CEO and president of the Parker Institute in San Francisco. "Instead of curing 30 percent of people with melanoma, how do we get it to help 80 percent of people with all cancers? But once you have success like immunotherapy has had, it becomes an engineering challenge - how do you amplify it, enhance it, exploit it?"

Interest in immune system

Bluestone said the genesis of the initiative came from Parker's personal interest in the immune system, because of his own asthma and allergies and auto-immune disease in his family. Visiting cancer centers some years ago because a friend had been diagnosed with the disease, he came to think that engaging the immune system to attack cancer was a better way to fight the disease than treatment that targets the tumor, Bluestone said.

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Parker, who also co-founded the file-sharing service Napster, declined to be interviewed before Wednesday's announcement. He was portrayed by Justin Timberlake in the 2010 movie The Social Network, a film about the start and early days of Facebook.

Parker, a billionaire, launched the Parker Foundation last June with $600 million in seed money, though he'd already been an active donor to health causes. He pledged $5 million in 2012 to Stand Up to Cancer and the Cancer Research Institute to create an immunotherapy dream team and $24 million in 2014 to create the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford. In December, he gave a $10 million grant to create the Sean N. Parker Autoimmune Research Laboratory at UCSF.

Each of the six centers in the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy will get $10 million to $15 million to get started. The investment will continue to increase annually.

Allison said the institute's priorities will be: developing novel approaches to modify the immune system's T cells to enhance their function and then developing a new generation of more effective T cell therapies; improving the rates of lasting responses and broadening the use of immunotherapies by better understanding why some patients respond so well, some respond only to relapse and some don't respond at all; and conducting DNA sequencing and immune system monitoring to identify new immunotherapy targets.

T-cell research included

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The institute will also fund research into the type of immunotherapy June pioneered at Penn - isolating T cells taken from a patient's blood, then genetically engineering them to recognize and kill cancer when they're reinjected in the patient;and the development of therapeutic cancer vaccines, which stimulate the immune system to fight cancer or stop its recurrence. M.D. Anderson has been actively involved in vaccine research.

"We're very excited to see the field we pioneered catching on and getting the resources needed to help more and more patients," said Jill O'Donnell-Tormey, CEO of the Cancer Research Institute in New York, a 63-year-old organization dedicated to funding and advocating immunotherapy. "This initiative should reap great benefits, but people need to remember that science isn't linear; there are jumps and stops and failures and successes. Immunotherapy's made everyone stand up and take notice, but it's still at the start."

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Todd Ackerman was a veteran reporter who covered medicine for the Houston Chronicle. A graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles, he previously worked for the Raleigh News & Observer, the National Catholic Register, the Los Angeles Downtown News and the San Clemente Sun-Post.