
Jedd Wolchok, MD, PhD
If not for BCRF/PFP, we wouldn't have been able to move our research from the laboratory to patients.
Chief, Melanoma & Immunotherapeutics Service
Associate Director, Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy
Attending Physician, Melanoma/Sarcoma Service
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Professor of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine
New York, New York
Area of Focus: Treatment
Co-Investigator: Taha Merghoub, PhD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York
Current Research:
- Seeking strategies to optimize an anti-tumor immune response in breast cancer patients.
- Several approaches to improve immunotherapy are being pursued, including a phase I clinical trial for a vaccine in HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer.
- These efforts could have a significant impact on advancing immunotherapy to benefit breast cancer patients.
The hope for a breast cancer vaccine is hampered by the fact that breast cancer cells look too much like normal cells and escape immune surveillance. Dr. Wolchok and his BCRF colleagues have devised a novel vaccine that overcomes this barrier. The vaccine is currently in clinical trial for patients with metastatic breast cancer. Other efforts are ongoing to improve response to immunotherapies.
BIO
Dr. Wolchok is Chief of the Melanoma and Immunotherapeutics Service, Attending Physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). Dr. Wolchok has helped establish MSKCC as a leader in the discovery and treatment of cancers with novel immunotherapies. Dr. Wolchok was instrumental in the clinical development leading to the approval of ipilimumab for advanced melanoma. He also leads the MSKCC Immune Monitoring Facility, a world-renowned full-time core dedicated to the pre-clinical and clinical cellular, serological and pathological monitoring of clinical trials of new immunotherapeutic approaches. He is Principal Investigator of numerous ongoing clinical trials at MSKCC in the area of immunotherapy. He supervises an NIH R01-funded basic science laboratory which is focused on investigating novel immunotherapeutic agents in pre-clinical laboratory models. In 2011, Dr. Wolchok established the Immunotherapeutics Clinical Core, a specialized phase 1-2 outpatient unit at MSKCC that is focused on the conduct of novel immunotherapy trials, with a specific emphasis on pharmacodynamic biomarker identification. This group treats patients with a broad spectrum of malignancies.