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t m c » p u l s e | j u n e 2 0 1 6 15 "He saw where the field was going, what the import- ant issues were, and he was fascinated with it all," Allison added. "He has a remarkable depth of knowl- edge, and he could propose experiments and trials to do." Though it ultimately took two years to get going, the institute's model is an evergreen one, which is unique, Allison said. Ownership of intellectual property developed in a member investigator's lab funded by the Parker Institute is divided among the investigator, his or her home institution, and the Parker Institute. The Parker Institute has the right of first refusal to develop and commercialize intellectual property, he added. As further evidence of Parker's entrepreneurial background, the institute is establishing its own IP office and is head-hunting for people with expertise in this area, Allison said. These will be people who really know the field and know what is hot. If they don't like the technology, they won't take it, but if they do, they will either market the technology to a company or form a small company around the IP. "That's a unique aspect of what Sean is doing," Allison added. "Any funding generated by the IP goes back into the institute and is distributed back to the individual sites. In theory, that could keep it going for some time, depending on how well we do in generat- ing useful stuff." The $35 million MD Anderson has to work with will also enable people on Allison's team, including co-director Padmanee Sharma, M.D., Ph.D., professor in the department of genitourinary medical oncology; Cassian Yee, M.D., professor in the department of melanoma medical oncology; Jennifer Wargo, M.D., associate professor in both the department of surgical oncology and department of genomic medicine; and Elizabeth Mittendorf, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor in the department of surgical oncology, to fund clinical trials that would have otherwise been hard to do. His team aims to understand the mechanism of checkpoints. Doctors are curing a lot of people, but it is still a fraction of the overall patient population. For example, 22 percent of metastatic melanoma patients, taking an antibody called ipilimumab, developed from Allison's research, are alive 10 years after a single treat- ment, based on a sample size of thousands of people, he said. When combined with a second generation drug called nivolumab, there is a similar action, but the overall response rate is 50 percent, and two-year survival rate is higher than that. "We need to know what is going on so we can get the numbers up," Allison said. "People who have been treating melanoma for years when we didn't have drugs that work say, 'Wow, 22 percent, that's incredible,' but looking at it from the other side, what about the 80 percent or the 50 percent who aren't responding even when you give both drugs?" Some of the cancers like melanoma, lung cancer, bladder and kidney cancer respond well to the drugs, but others including prostate, glioblastoma and pancreatic cancers don't, so Allison would like to understand why that is, and how to increase the response rate. To do that requires a lot of money, because clinical trials and technology both are expensive, Allison said. His research could benefit from the latest technology that analyzes tumor tissue, both prior to treatment with drugs and during treatment. "We know there are at least eight or so of these negative checkpoints, but we want to know what kind of cells they are on, why they appear in patterns, what that means and how to use that information to decide the next course of treatment, for example," he added. The Parker Institute has engaged with compa- nies on the leading-edge of developing instruments and technology with the goal of getting its six sites early access to those technologies. As a result, MD Anderson is now a beta test site for an instrument that outlines the chemistry of tumor sections in 40 colors. Meanwhile, the institute is trying to work up clini- cal trials for all of the sites to collaborate. Said Allison: "As a group, the directors of the partner sites decided on some key issues that need to be resolved, and everyone is going to work collectively on them." Created through a $250 million grant from The Parker Foundation More than 300 of the nation's top researchers focused on treating the most deadly cancers In side the PARKER INSTITUTE for CANCER IMMUNOTHERAPY Six centers: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Stanford Medicine, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Pennsylvania and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Goal: Accelerate the development of breakthrough immune therapies capable of turning cancer into a curable disease by ensuring the coordination and collaboration of the field's top researchers and quickly turning their findings into patient treatments Over 40 laboratories Source: The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy

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