Cancerwise

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.