Maloney has been working with targeted cancer therapies since the early 1980s. As a student at Stanford, Maloney was part of a team that developed antibodies specifically targeting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma while avoiding healthy cells. Today, he is one of the oncologists on the forefront of the next major advance in immunotherapy. He infuses lymphoma patients with their own T-cells, re-engineered to produce a chimeric antigen receptor (or CAR T-cells) that, once triggered, can eliminate cancer. The infusion is only a 30-minute procedure, though the entire process takes several weeks. But unlike antibodies, which are broken down by the body over time, CAR T-cells may continue to multiply, serving as a “living therapy” throughout a patient’s life— staying on guard for any subsequent relapses.

“We are moving away from a bottle-off-a-shelf model, one-size-fits-all approach,” Maloney explained, “to a way of fighting cancer where we are essentially custom-making treatments for patients, training a person’s immune system to go after a target and remember what that target looked like in the future.”

This June, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, for the second year in a row, the big news was immunotherapy for multiple types of cancer, including kidney, lung, bladder, and melanoma. Researchers presented new data that drugs designed to unlock a patient’s immune system are significantly extending the lives of some patients with the most advanced stages of the disease.

Take the 2013 Bristol-Myers Squibb study led by Dr. Jedd Wolchok at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Doctors used a combination of two drugs—one approved, the other experimental—in 52 melanoma patients, and found that treatment with both immunotherapy drugs resulted in rapid and deep tumor regressions about one-third of the time. This type of immunotherapy uses antibodies, given intravenously, which rev up the immune system. “We are talking about very significant survival rates here, with all the caveats of cross-trial comparison, of course,” Wolchok said. “But these are materially distinct numbers. We have spent several decades in cancer research learning better ways to treat the tumor. Now we are learning how to treat the patient.”

While the FDA only approved the first modern immuno-oncology drug, Yervoy, in 2011, the concept of immunotherapy dates back to the 19th century. In the 1890s, William Coley, a bone-sarcoma surgeon at New York Cancer Hospital (now Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), tried using heat-killed bacteria to cure cancer. He noticed that some patients seemed to live longer if they developed an infection after their cancer surgery, and he hypothesized that their immune system had been mobilized, fighting not just the infection, but their cancer too. Over the next 40 years, he injected more than 1,000 patients with bacteria known as Coley’s Toxins—reporting “excellent results” in bone and soft-tissue cancers.