A Conversation with Elizabeth Jaffee

Editor's Note: Dr. Elizabeth Jaffee is Deputy Director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, Co-Director of the Cancer Immunology Program, and Professor of Oncology at John Hopkins Medicine. Recently RAS Central editors spoke with Dr. Jaffee about her career developing immunotherapies for cancer.

How did you first get interested in immunotherapy? When I was in college in 1977 to 1981, Milstein and Kohler's hybridoma technology had just come out, I think it was in 1976, and I was really taken aback by it. I was a biochem major but I was very interested in virology and the immune system. Then I heard a lecture by David Baltimore and I really got excited and I did research using hybridoma technology as an undergrad to try to understand, believe it or not, heavy chain switching, which of course didn't really get understood until molecular technologies were improved. But it was a good project in the context of the time, and I kept thinking and I read some of the history of cancer. I had read about patients with infections developing immune response to cancer, the whole Coley story. Then I took a year after completing my internal medicine residency to do a year of NIH funded research, basically a year in which you do a small research project and you take some didactic classes. I worked with a cancer immunologist at the University of Pittsburgh, John Kirkwood, and that's when T cells were becoming understood better, because IL2 had been cloned and you could now isolate and grow T cells. The field was starting to boom, and then I came to Hopkins with the concept that that's what I was going to do. I got involved in these genetically modified vaccines which basically looked at all different cytokines to see what would cause the cascade of events that could induce an antitumor response.

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