Jill O’Donnell-Tormey is the chief executive officer and director of scientific affairs of the Cancer Research Institute, a New York-based nonprofit that awards research grants and fellowships to scientists working in the area of cancer immunotherapy. O’Donnell-Tormey is excited by the progress that’s been made of late in many different technologies aimed at harnessing the immune system to fight cancer. Among them: engineered viruses, checkpoint inhibitors (drugs that block immune-suppressing proteins) and chimeric antigen receptor T-cells (CARTs), which are personalized therapies that involve removing T-cells from the blood of patients and engineering them to attack their particular cancers.
