Earlier this month, doctors at the National Institutes of Health made a promising step in the fight

against cancer. In a paper published in Nature Medicine, an immunotherapy treatment, which

uses the body's own defenses, was able to shrink gastrointestinal tumors for about a quarter of

patients. But NIH staffing shortages, layoffs, and cuts are threatening

to delay the implementation of this promising development. William Brangham recently spoke with

Dr. Steve Rosenberg, who helped pioneer that treatment about this precarious moment for federally

funded science. Dr. Rosenberg, so good to have you on the program.

Thank you for being here.

You have been working in this field of immunology for a very long period of time.

For people who have not been following cancer research as closely as you have,

can you help us understand how significant a development was this?

We've had three effective ways to treat cancer over the previous decades, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.

And the best application of those treatments can cure over half of everyone who develops cancer now.

But the ability of cancer to spread to different sites

still is a major problem, and over 600,000 Americans will die every year of cancer unless we develop

better treatments. And so rather than using scalples, radiation beams, and drugs, we're trying to take advantage of the body's own natural immune system that recognizes a cancer as foreign, but not foreign enough to reject it.

And our goal is to stimulate the immune system to be strong enough to get rid of the cancer.

And that approach is called immunotherapy.

And so this technique showed promise in about a quarter of the tumors.

Who were the patients that were most benefiting from this?

What kinds of patients?

What were they suffering from?

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