Alison Ringel, PhD

Immune therapy is a cancer treatment that turns on killer T cells to attack the tumor. It is a major advance in cancer care. As it is less damaging to healthy tissue than chemotherapy, it has fewer side effects. Most importantly, it can help patients with advanced disease who had few options before. However, many patients do not benefit from immune therapy. The reasons why are not fully understood. Cancer affects people of all ages, but it is much more common in the elderly. T cells are key to the success of immune therapy, but aged T cells do not work as well as young ones. We have discovered that a signal important for T cell function is lost as people age. The loss happens even before a tumor appears. As tumors grow, aging makes even more T cells lose this signal. Our research will test whether the loss of this signal explains why older patients do not respond to immune checkpoint therapies. We will explore ways to restore this signal to improve treatment outcomes. Through this research, we hope to make immune therapy effective for more patients, especially older adults who face the highest rates of cancer.