Stanford receives grant to create center for support of cancer immunotherapy

Stanford is one of four institutions to receive National Cancer Institute funding to analyze patients’ immune function and tumor profiles as part of a public-private partnership to accelerate cancer therapies.

Holden Maecker

The School of Medicine is one of four institutions to receive a grant from the National Cancer Institute to establish a Center for the Immune Monitoring and Analysis of Cancer. Together, the centers will form a network of laboratories to support adult and pediatric immunotherapy trials by analyzing patients’ immune phenotype and function and performing deep tumor profiling.

The grant provides the Stanford center approximately $12.5 million over five years. It will be headed by Holden Maecker, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology, and director of the Stanford Human Immune Monitoring Center; and Sean Bendall, PhD, assistant professor of pathology.

Sean Bendall

Other recipients of the CIMAC grants are the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas.

The grants were announced by the National Cancer Institute as part of its $215 million Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies effort, which is a public-private collaboration between the National Institutes of Health and 11 biopharmaceutical companies. The partnership is part of the NIH’s Cancer Moonshot.

About Stanford Medicine

Stanford Medicine is an integrated academic health system comprising the Stanford School of Medicine and adult and pediatric health care delivery systems. Together, they harness the full potential of biomedicine through collaborative research, education and clinical care for patients. For more information, please visit med.stanford.edu.

2023 ISSUE 3

Exploring ways AI is applied to health care