Contributors

As a medical student at the University of Zurich in the 1980s, Daniel E. Speiser was intrigued by how the immune system responds to infection, transplantation, and cancer, he recalls. After graduating, he trained in clinical medicine and experimental immunology. In the ensuing three decades, he has investigated the use of patient’s immune cells to fight cancer, and performed clinical trials testing novel cancer immunotherapies. One of his proudest research accomplishments, Speiser says, came in the 1990s, when he helped work out the mechanisms of how T cells destroy leukemia cells in patients treated with bone marrow from a donor. His findings led to more effective matching of patients and donors. The success of such transplants—which allow patients to generate immune cells that fight their leukemia—was “the first demonstration in the clinic that the immune system can control cancer highly effectively, and that was really fantastic to see,” he says. ...