New Approaches to Fighting Cancer

  Join your fellow Rotarians on Friday to welcome our speaker Dr. Ed Engleman. Dr. Engleman is a Professor of Medicine and Pathology at Stanford’s School of Medicine. He has held this post since 1990. As a Professor, he oversees the Stanford Blood Center and his own Immunology Research Group. Dr. Engleman holds an M.D. from Columbia University School of Medicine, completed postgraduate training at the University of California, San Francisco and the National Institutes of Health and received a B.S. from Harvard University. He is an Editor of numerous scientific journals and the inventor of multiple patented technologies. Dr. Engleman has authored more than 250 publications in medical and scientific journals and has trained more than 200 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

  Dr. Engleman's research is directed at understanding the role of the cellular immune system in cancer and other life threatening conditions and in evaluating the potential to manipulate immune cells for the treatment of these diseases. His team has found a type of immune cell can be primed to attack and eliminate various kinds of malignant cancers in mice. The researchers studied mouse models of melanoma, pancreatic, breast and lung cancer and found that their technique could eliminate not only primary tumors, but also distant metastases throughout the body. Dr. Engleman is the lead inventor of the technology underlying Provenge, a cancer vaccine, which was shown to extend life for patients with metastatic prostate cancer with remarkably few side effects. He will tell us what new possibilities may be on the horizon.