Kipp Weiskopf, MD, PhD

“Targeted therapies” are drugs that turn off molecular switches in cancer cells to stop their growth. These therapies allow many lung cancer patients to live longer, but they do not cure patients. In most cases, the cancer returns or continues to grow after a few years. Immunotherapies, which train a patient’s immune system to fight cancer, have emerged as another promising treatment for lung cancer. Although there has been remarkable success using immunotherapies, these drugs also do not cure the majority of lung cancer patients. We will investigate how therapies that activate immune cells called macrophages can be used to enhance targeted therapies for cancer. We will focus our effort on lung cancers with specific mutations in a gene called KRAS, but we expect our findings will apply to other types of lung cancer as well. We hope that by combining these two types of therapies, we will identify a strategy to cure certain types of lung cancer.