Joseph Crompton, MD, PhD

University of California, Los Angeles
$100,000 Tower Career Development Grant

Research Title:
Stem Cell Reprogramming of Anti-Tumor T Cells

Cancer is a leading cause of death. A cancer treatment called TIL therapy can cure patients, even when other treatments have failed. TIL therapy consists of surgically removing a tumor, isolating immune cells from inside the tumor, and then injecting the immune cells back into the blood of the person from whom the tumor was removed. The immune cells can naturally move around the body and kill cancer cells, but one of the main problems with TIL therapy is that the immune cells do not live long enough to completely kill all sites of disease. Here we propose to strengthen the immune cells so that they can live long enough to kill all cancer cells in the body. Our approach involves turning the immune cells into stem cells that have the capacity to make copies of themselves and live a long time. This would provide a big advance in the field so that more people suffering from cancer can be cured with TIL therapy.

Joseph Crompton is a surgeon-scientist with a busy clinical practice focusing on patients suffering from skin cancers and soft tissue sarcoma. He has a research program that aims at characterizing the immune response to cancer with the goal of developing novel immunotherapies to treat advanced disease.