For Christian Hinrichs, an oncologist who leads the cancer immunotherapy division at the Rutgers Cancer Institute, the search for effective treatments is more than just an interesting scientific question—it is a personal one. His own bout with cancer more than a decade earlier made him acutely aware of just how important it is to find therapies that completely eliminate tumors, steering his research toward engineering patients’ own cells to find and kill cancer cells and running clinical trials to bring these treatments into practice.
I trained initially as a general surgeon, but after I finished my training, I recognized the limitations of surgery, especially in the setting of advanced cancers, so I started conducting research on tumor immunology. But my research wasn’t as clinically applicable as I wanted it to be because it did not address the types of cancer being treated in the clinic where it could make the ...
