"I will relate more later anent an exception or 2 to what I said above. I also managed to ask a few questions that... [Dr. Wolchok] answered."
1) Dr. Wolchok did discuss more extensively the CAR-T therapy he discussed only briefly during his Wistar presentation a year earlier. He noted the FDA had approved CAR-T therapies for use in humans, specifically that of KITE. He pointed to the recent acquisition of KITE by GILD, and also the acquisition of the private company discussed in post #s 3202239 and others[e.g.,'264, '256, '273],all in an attempt to improve the safety of such therapies that have been found unpredictably toxic--sometimes fatal as in trials by KITE and JUNO--by reason of cytokine storms. He cautioned that the administration of such therapy to patients must now be accompanied by readiness to quickly administer a mitigating steroid to control those toxicities.
2) The hour passed all too quickly---near 5:20, Dr. Wolchok drew attention to one or more papers by Zappadosi et al that discuss a molecule I had not seen mention before---alpha-GITR, pronounced "gitter" apparently.
3) A short Q&A session followed. It ended with an invitation for those who had further questions to step to the front to ask them before the reception began. For my part, I took the opportunity to remind Dr. Wolchok of the question I had asked him the year before at Wistar[CP's question]. He nodded he remembered that question. I then renewed that question to ask, in light of the year of further experience, data collection, posters presented at 2017 AACR[e.g. #1651] and 2017 SITC by PPHM and MSKCC, his discussion re CAR-T[my summary in paragraph 1) above], and clinical trials begun by other NCCN members[one by JHU, another by MGH and D-F], if anything had been done by MSKCC to initiate a clinical trial in human patients? He answered by stating that an experimental design had been completed for such a trial...for what indication(s) he did not say, nor did I ask.
Rather, I asked "when will that trial design be implemented"? He said "that depends on the company." as he left the auditorium.
In retrospect now, both of those 2 answers comprise multiple potentials, IMO.
More about that later.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
