VIDEO: NIH’s Cancer Chief Sees Advances as Historical

Immunotherapy sounded like science fiction the first time someone described it to Ned Sharpless long before the White House tapped him to lead the nation’s cancer research programs.

“It really did not sound like a real thing. But now we’re curing people with that approach,” Sharpless said from a building on the National Institutes of Health’s campus in Bethesda, Md., that overlooks the world’s largest research hospital.

Immunotherapy essentially trains the immune system to fight off cancer, and has been shown to be highly effective in some cases. When Novartis’s Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) cleared the Food and Drug Administration ...