Immunotherapy advances that are only possible here
Immunotherapy pioneer: My journey to help create the James P. Allison Institute™
September 10, 2026
My journey to the creation of the James P. Allison Institute™ has been this really amazing path of bringing together science and medicine.
That kind of integration, developed here at UT MD Anderson, can help us solve problems that seem intractable. Now, it’s time to look at our up-and-coming researchers and build the resources and collaboration they need, so we can drive even greater breakthroughs for our patients.
Starting in the sciences
I was born in Guyana, a small country in South America. When I was 7 years old, I had a terrible accident. I fell down the stairs and was in a coma for a week. I also broke my arm. We thought I might never be able to use it, but it healed and I went through rehab.
That experience really shaped my view of the world. I was so inspired by how generous, compassionate, and empathetic the doctors, nurses and staff were in taking care of the children in that ward, including me. Those doctors were doing something profound, and I decided I wanted to contribute to that.
So, when I came to the U.S. as an immigrant in 1980, I was really focused on going to medical school. I went to a pre-medical high school. I took summer courses as a teenager and learned about conducting science in a lab. As an undergraduate student studying biology in Boston, I joined a lab focused on T cell signaling and how it occurred through the T cell receptor.
That was when I knew I was hooked on the science part of it, but I still wanted to practice medicine directly with patients. So, I joined an M.D./Ph.D. program. Then, I did my post-doctoral work in a lab working on cancer immunotherapy and conducted translational research studies based on clinical trials with cancer vaccines.
During that time, I contributed to the design of the original trial with MDX-010, now known as ipilimumab. In that trial, several patients had all of their tumors go away. I wanted to understand the immunologic mechanisms that elicited that type of clinical response and why it didn’t happen in all patients.
When I came to UT MD Anderson in 2004, I established a translational immunotherapy research program to uncover the mechanisms of response and resistance to immune checkpoint therapy. I designed and conducted the first pre-surgical trial (also known as a neoadjuvant trial) of immune checkpoint therapy to administer ipilimumab and collect blood and tumor samples from patients for immune monitoring studies in my lab.
In 2012, Jim Allison, Ph.D., and I transformed that program into the Immunotherapy Platform to apply the concept of deep immune monitoring on patients’ samples into practice for all immunotherapy studies at UT MD Anderson. We then established the clinical immunology working group to help any faculty at UT MD Anderson engage with the Immunotherapy Platform.
More recently, based on our shared vision, we founded the Allison Institute™, where I serve as vice president and head of the institute,, and Jim serves as vice president and founding director.
The foundation of the Allison Institute™
The work being done through the Allison Institute™ is only possible here at UT MD Anderson. The Immunotherapy Platform has been able to work on over 150 protocols or projects across 18 UT MD Anderson departments; we have collected over 50,000 tissue samples in those studies.
Because UT MD Anderson sees so many patients, our doctors get to regularly see the rarest and most complex cancer cases. We can gather enough tissue from a cancer of interest to really understand the effects of therapies on the immune system and the mechanisms of response and resistance. We can then turn around and test these insights rigorously and quickly in the lab, with data eventually translated back to the clinic.
We’re in this era of patients being cured with immune checkpoint therapy because Jim Allison conducted ground-breaking basic science research. It’s basic science that led us to cure so many cancer patients.
In order to continue to realize the promise of basic science in medicine, the Allison Institute™ is recruiting people from diverse scientific backgrounds in areas such as chemical biology, protein engineering, microbiology, and immunology. We're not just focused on immunology. We’re enabling cross-disciplinary science.
Thanks to UT MD Anderson’s collaborative nature, we put physician-scientists next to basic scientists, and we put clinical investigators next to all of them. We can bridge this gap of everything that takes us from the basic science all the way to a novel therapy for our patients.
The basic science foundation can be beneficial for so many other disease types that are out there: autoimmune diseases, Alzheimer's disease, cardiovascular disease. Obviously, we’re focused on cancer, but I do think we’re going to have impact broadly and that is what we should be working toward: how to make the basic science the foundation that leads us to better care for all patients.
Advancing immunotherapy research through the Allison Institute™
The Allison Institute™ has recruited next-generation scientists who are really leading the way in immunotherapy. Here are what a few of them are working on currently:
Hojong Yoon, Ph.D., is working on glues that can bring proteins together to manipulate their activities in immune cells and in the cancer. There are certain proteins that you want to come together to form an interaction that allows for a therapeutic response. He’s worked out the chemistry behind how to do that for a wide range of potentially useful targets.
Susan Bullman, Ph.D., is working on understanding the microbiome within tumors and how we can take advantage of that understanding to develop new methods of targeting the tumor microbiome to achieve better therapeutic outcomes.
Sangeeta Goswami, M.D., Ph.D., is developing an understanding of the epigenetic mechanisms of myeloid cells. Although we were very focused on T cells in the beginning, the immune system is very broad and myeloid cells play an important role. Her work is helping us understand how, especially in glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer, myeloid cells have been reprogrammed to suppress the T cell immune response. She’s looking at how we then target those immunosuppressive epigenetic pathways to reignite those suppressed T cell responses.
These individuals and our other Allison Institute™ members are leading brand new ways in which we can get therapies for our patients. We have to support that work. It’s on us now — all of us — to collaborate and think of ways we can integrate all these different groups.
And the Allison Institute™ is providing the housing and the home, or safe space, for everybody to work together and do that. It’s the best way we can drive breakthroughs for patients, not only here at UT MD Anderson, but everywhere.
Padmanee Sharma, M.D., Ph.D., is vice president and head of the Allison Institute™.
Topics
ImmunotherapyPadmanee Sharma, M.D., Ph.D., and Jim Allison, Ph.D., in the lab.
Now, it’s time to look at our up-and-coming researchers and build the resources and collaboration they need, so we can drive even greater breakthroughs for our patients.
Padmanee Sharma, M.D., Ph.D.
Vice President and Head, Allison Institute™