Steinman: Photograph by Ingbert Grüttner/Rockefeller University. Dendritic cell: Rockefeller University Press.
Ralph Steinman in 1983. He would become his most compelling experiment.                            
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Dendritic cell: Rockefeller University Press.
The cell Steinman hoped would save his life looks  something like a sea anemone or a ruffled shrimp dumpling.                             
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The Nobel Foundation doesn’t allow posthumous awards, so when news of  Ralph Steinman’s death reached Stockholm a few hours later, a minor  intrigue ensued over whether the committee would have to rescind the  prize. It would not, in fact; but while newspapers stressed the medal  mishap (“Nobel jury left red-faced by death of laureate”),  they spent less time on the strange story behind the gaffe. That  Steinman’s eligibility was even in question, that he’d been dead for  just three days instead of, say, three years, was itself a minor  miracle.        
In the spring of 2007, Steinman, a 64-year-old senior physician and  research immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York, had come  home from a ski trip with a bad case of diarrhea, and a few days later  he showed up for work with yellow eyes and yellow skin — symptoms of a  cancerous mass the size of a kiwi that was growing on the head of his  pancreas. Soon he learned that the disease had made its way into nearby  lymph nodes. Among patients with his condition, 80 percent are dead  within the first year; another 90 percent die the year after that. When  he told his children about the tumor over Skype, he said, “Don’t Google  it.”        
But for a man who had spent his life in the laboratory, who brought  copies of The New England Journal of Medicine on hiking trips to Vermont  and always made sure that family vacations overlapped with scientific  symposia, there was only one way to react to such an awful diagnosis —  as a scientist. The outlook for pancreatic cancer is so poor, and the  established treatments so useless, that any patient who has the disease  might as well shoot the moon with new, untested therapies. For Steinman,  the prognosis offered the opportunity to run one last experiment.         
In the long struggle that was to come, Steinman would try anything and  everything that might extend his life, but he placed his greatest hope  in a field he helped create, one based on discoveries for which he would  earn his Nobel Prize. He hoped to reprogram his immune cells to defeat  his cancer — to concoct a set of treatments from his body’s own  ingredients, which could take over from his chemotherapy and form a  customized, dynamic treatment for his disease. These would be as far  from off-the-shelf as medicines can get: vaccines designed for the tumor  in his gut, made from the products of his plasma, that could only ever  work for him.        
Steinman would be the only patient in this makeshift trial, but the  personalized approach for which he would serve as both visionary and  guinea pig has implications for the rest of us. It is known as cancer  immunotherapy, and its offshoots have just now begun to make their way  into the clinic, and treatments have been approved for tumors of the  skin and of the prostate. For his last experiment, conducted with no  control group, Steinman would try to make his life into a useful  anecdote — a test of how the treatments he assembled might be put to  work. “Once he got diagnosed with cancer, he really started talking  about changing the paradigm of cancer treatment,” his daughter Alexis  says. “That’s all he knew how to do. He knew how to be a scientist.”         
First, Steinman needed to see his tumor. Not an M.R.I. or CT scan, but  the material itself. The trouble was that most people with his cancer  never have surgery. If there’s cause to think the tumor has spread — and  there usually is — it may not be worth the risk of having it removed,  along with the bile duct, the gallbladder, large portions of the stomach  and the duodenum. Luckily for Steinman, early scans showed that his  tumor was a candidate for resection. On the morning of April 3, 2007,  less than two weeks after his diagnosis, he went in for the four-hour  procedure at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, just across the  avenue from his office at Rockefeller University.        
After two hours on the operating table, his surgeon, Dan Coit, lifted  the tumor from his abdomen. It was about two and a half inches long.  Coit stitched a short thread across its top and a longer one on the side  — an embroidered code to help the pathologists get oriented — and sent  the specimen upstairs, wrapped in a towel and nestled in a tray of ice.         
Claudia and Alexis were waiting in the lobby, along with Sarah  Schlesinger, a longtime friend and member of Steinman’s lab, who is also  a board-certified pathologist. It would be her job to manage the  disbursement of the tumor to Steinman’s colleagues around the world, so  its every nuance could be tested and its fragments incorporated into the  drugs that would compose his treatment. When she arrived at the lab  upstairs and held the tumor, it was still so warm that she could feel  the heat through her latex gloves.        
She chopped and sliced the tumor into samples, based on a list that  Steinman helped draw up beforehand. A few grams would be placed in  screw-top vials filled with a preservative for their RNA. Steinman’s  administrative assistant would take another piece to Boston on an  afternoon train, and some would go to a former student, Kang Liu, so she  could sew confetti-sized squares of the tumor into living mice.  If there was any left, they would send it to a researcher in Baltimore  named Elizabeth Jaffee, who had mastered the art of culturing pancreatic  cancer in a dish.        
The mass was big enough that Schlesinger could get through all the items  on the list. In the days, weeks and months that followed, Steinman’s  cancer was sent to labs in Boston and Baltimore, Toronto and Tübingen,  Germany, Dallas and Durham, N.C. With help from friends and former  students, he would squeeze every bit of data from his cancer that he  could.        
Steinman’s last experiment would be, in many ways, the culmination of a  new trend in cancer research: designing custom treatments for each  patient. When he got sick, Steinman knew that the five-year survival  rate for his kind of tumor was, at most, 1 in 10, even at  Sloan-Kettering, one of the best oncology centers in the world.  Typically, patients live six months. But he also knew that his chances  might not be as bad as they looked. The means and medians of his disease  were drawn from populations and so did not reflect the fact that every  tumor is unique. Even tumors that look the same — cancers starting from a  common organ, or a common kind of cell — may behave in different ways:  some shrink and some expand; some succumb to chemotherapy. Now doctors  can scan each tumor for clues about its DNA and use those clues to  determine its strengths and weaknesses. Steinman could have his case  described right down to the letters of its genome, in hopes of figuring  out which therapies might work best for him.        
This “personalized” approach to treating cancer, which subdivides the  classic types according to distortions in their genes, has been growing  at a rapid pace. In the past few years, laboratories financed by the  government have set out to build a comprehensive atlas of the cancer genome — to collect 500 tumors from each of 25 kinds of the disease and then  to analyze their DNA and RNA at a cost of more than $100 million a year.  The advent of inexpensive genome sequencing has produced a gold rush in  the commercial sector, too, with the promise that anyone’s tumor can be  sliced and processed and analyzed, until its genetic fingerprint is  decoded.        
“It was thought a while ago that cancer would be too complex for us to  really get our hands around it,” says Raju Kucherlapati, one of the  principal investigators on the Cancer Genome Atlas and a professor of  genetics at Harvard Medical School. But current research showed that  “the total number of major biochemical pathways that are altered is not  limitless.” If that’s true, then doctors might use these genomic data to  improve their patients’ odds. Instead of applying a one-size-fits-all  approach to treatment, they could select a mix of therapies from a  standard arsenal, choosing only those that matched the features of a  patient’s tumor. “I would venture to say that within the next 10 years,  we could see a very significant revolution in the way that we think  about and treat cancer,” Kucherlapati says.        
The genomic approach that Kucherlapati and others have advanced sees  every person’s cancer as a snowflake — a crystal made from several dozen  basic shapes. But this idea has lately run across a deeper layer of  complexity and one that is only now being outlined in the lab. For a paper published in the spring of 2012,  a group of scientists based in London looked at tiny pebbles of disease  from four kidney-cancer patients. Instead of limiting their analysis to  a single piece of each tumor — one piece of tissue, excised after  surgery or drawn out through a needle — the researchers took malignant  cells from all over the patients’ bodies. They sliced specimens from  more than half a dozen spots on the primary tumor, and then more from  places where the cancer had spread: in the lungs, the chest wall and the  fat surrounding the kidneys. When they compared the genomes at each  location, they found a whole suite of tumor types with only a distant  family resemblance, as if each spot and organ had become the home for  its own phylum of disease. The growths were related — they had all  descended from a common ancestor — but the cancer had mutated in new  directions, sprouting a canopy of branches and twigs on its evolutionary  tree. Samples drawn right from a kidney — as close as possible to where  the tumor started — shared only a third of their mutations with the  other offshoots.        
A number of recent studies came to similar conclusions. Taken together, they reiterate what has  long been known but not quite grasped in such detail: that even a single  cancer patient carries a private ecosystem of pathology within her  body, a tropical rain forest of disease. If the old chemotherapies and  radioactive treatments worked like napalm to blast away the canopy, the  new breed of personalized therapies target only specific plants. For  some cancers, the more homogeneous ones, they do the job just fine. For  others, though, the approach comes up against the relentless rules of  Darwinian selection. Wipe out one subtype of a cancer — the clone that  seems most aggressive, say, or the one that’s most prevalent in a biopsy  — and you may have slowed the disease or thinned it out. But the cells  left behind might represent a fitter strain and fill the niche.        
Faced with this troubling complexity, doctors have fallen back on  treating cancer like a game of Whac-A-Mole: find the harshest clone and  knock it down, then repeat the process when the tumor reappears. Or else  doctors will attack the tree right at its trunk, by finding those  ancestral genes that every species in the body shares. But there’s  another way to counter cancer’s biodiversity. Our bodies come equipped  with a system custom-built to handle pathogens in all their many forms.  If the immune organs could be activated against a cancer, we might find a  pathway through the jungle and, maybe, to a cure.        
“The work that the immune system does to sculpt itself around a cancer —  that’s really the ultimate type of personalized medicine,” says Jedd  Wolchok, a cancer immunotherapy expert at Memorial Sloan-Kettering who  consulted on Steinman’s treatment. “The immune system’s job is to  recognize the signs of danger and then with very exquisite precision to  mobilize antibodies” and T-cells “that very, very precisely bind to  individual targets.” Once that system locks on to its target, it can  make adjustments, too, shaping the response to match the contortions and  mutations of a tumor in real time. “It’s a therapy that lives,” Wolchok  says, “rather than a medicine that passes in and out of the system.”         
That’s the approach Steinman believed in most; it’s the one he was  pursuing in his lab for many years before he got sick. But for a cancer  vaccine to work, for any vaccine to work, the body has to learn the  difference between its healthy cells and the ones that have been  transformed into disease. It has to recognize its evil twin. And the  part of the immune system that makes that possible, the mechanism by  which our cells learn to kill one thing and leave another alone, was the  focus of Steinman’s whole career.        
The cell Steinman hoped would save his life looks something like a sea  anemone or a ruffled shrimp dumpling. But when it’s viewed flat under  the microscope, those squiggly sheets of membrane extend in cross  section, like long, sinewy arms. That’s how they looked one day at  Rockefeller in the early 1970s, when Steinman first spotted them in a  dish of cells cultured from a crushed-up mouse spleen. When he announced  his finding at a meeting in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1973, he said  those appendages reminded him of his tall and graceful wife. He thought  about calling them claudiacytes.        
Instead, with the assent of his supervisor at Rockefeller, the cell  biologist Zanvil Cohn, Steinman declared his cells “dendritic,” from the  Greek dendron for tree. This was, he intuited, a kind of cell  that had never before been characterized and that served as the missing  link in the body’s adaptive response to pathogens. Over the next few  decades, Steinman would devote all of his work to the expansion of this idea:  he would show his immune cell was not, as many suspected, just an  oddball form of the macrophages, but something else entirely — a  sentinel that guards our bodies from infection by teaching the soldiers  of the immune system to distinguish their enemies from their friends.         
The dendritic cell can lurk in the outer layers of the skin, in the  throat, in the lining of the intestines and on any other surface where a  bacterium or virus might try to edge its way into our flesh. When the  cell grabs hold of something strange, it absorbs that foreign matter,  digests it and drapes the macerated bits along its membrane. Then the  cell inches its way along lymphatic ducts to the places in the body  where immune cells gather and communicate and presents these bits as  signs of an invasion.        
Few took this work seriously in the early years. Lab mates dismissed  Steinman’s spindly plasms; in the late 1970s, he lost his government  grants. But the work went on, with Steinman evangelizing for his  discovery until he inspired a network of immunologists to join his  field. “He loved to see himself as a dendritic cell,” Schlesinger says.  In a talk he gave in 2007, after winning the Lasker Award for Basic  Medical Research, he waved his arms around in demonstration, like the conductor of a symphony with a dendrite baton.        
By the 1990s, his discovery had given life to an old idea: that a more  perfect knowledge of our immune system would lead to vaccines for  otherwise intractable diseases. If the dendritic cell could be hijacked  and put to use, if those markers on its membranes could be manipulated,  then doctors might be able to inoculate their patients against H.I.V.,  tuberculosis or even cancer. Early experiments based on this premise  came to little in clinical trials, though; Steinman and his colleagues  learned it wouldn’t be enough to load the dendritic cells with antigen,  to give the body’s bloodhounds sweaty socks. The cells would need  another signal too — something to inspire them to share their message  with the rest of the immune system. In the absence of that “go” signal, a  dendritic cell might do the opposite of what was intended: it might  parade its antigens around the lymph nodes as an example of what should  be ignored, not what should be killed. Depending on the context, a  dendritic cell could induce action or inaction, immunity or tolerance.         
But Steinman never lost faith in his discovery as a vehicle for  medicine. When he learned that he was sick, he signed up to have his  tumor engineered into three existing, experimental vaccines. Each of  these had been in testing for patients with other types of cancer, but  Steinman had them customized with samples from his own disease. First he  tried one, called GVAX, made from his irradiated cancer cells and  fitted with a gene that, upon injection, sounds a warning call that  recruits dendritic cells. Then he tried a pair of treatments using  dendritic cells that were filtered from his blood, loaded with his  cancer’s RNA (in one) or peptides (in the other) and put back into his  body. In each case, fragments of his tumor would serve as both the  quarry and the bait.        
“It was just like the old days,” says Ira Mellman, a former trainee in  Steinman’s lab and, by the time Steinman got sick, vice president of  research oncology at Genentech in San Francisco. “We were all sitting  around discussing what next week’s experiments should look like, except  this time the experiments were him.” As the treatment plan took shape,  Schlesinger managed reams of paperwork. For access to each experimental  drug, Steinman would need to enroll himself in a single-patient,  compassionate-use protocol with approval from the Food and Drug  Administration. (The government receives around 1,000 applications for  these one-person treatments every year and grants almost all of them, as  long as the patient has cooperation from doctors and the relevant drug  companies.)        
Schlesinger also served as Steinman’s physician for the vaccine  treatments, administering the shots, taking blood and checking up to see  how he was doing. The team kept track of his response to each  immune-based treatment as it played out in his T-cells. But the real  benchmark, and the better index of his disease, was a carbohydrate  protein called CA19-9 — a tumor byproduct that was also measured in his  blood. When his levels were going down, it meant the cancer was in  retreat. After each phase of his experiment, Steinman plotted out his  readings and pasted them into slides on PowerPoint.        
The same vaccines that Steinman received have shown promise in other  patients. The irradiated-cell approach may increase survival for some  patients with metastatic prostate cancer. A team based at Baylor  University in Dallas has found encouraging results for reinfused  dendritic cells in Stage 4 melanoma. But for the man who would later win  the Nobel Prize for discovering dendritic cells, would these treatments  work at all?        
Steinman stayed in good health for the first few years — he still went  for runs in Central Park or along the Charles in Boston — though the  numbers from his blood tests were at times disheartening. His T-cells  showed some signs of activation: they could recognize the markers from  his cancer, but there was no way to tell if they were getting inside his  tumor. “He wanted to see a much better response,” says Rafick-Pierre  Sekaly, an immunologist at the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute of  Florida who helped to analyze the data. In between the experimental  treatments, Steinman was taking a drug called gemcitabine, a  chemotherapy traditionally used in the treatment of pancreatic cancer to  which he had a very good response. When he took gemcitabine, his CA19-9  would founder; the cancer would start to disappear. When he switched  onto the vaccines, the tumor readings inched back up. “That was so  upsetting to him, that he always needed the chemotherapy,” Sekaly says.         
When he wasn’t on vaccines or chemotherapy, Steinman tried whatever else  he could find. He had his tumor’s genome sequenced, to check for  special vulnerabilities. At Genentech, Mellman tested a sample of  Steinman’s tumor in a dish against the company’s whole library of  pharmaceuticals. “We threw at his cells every drug that we had in  development at the time,” he says, including many that hadn’t yet  entered clinical trials. Meanwhile, the mice that received pieces of  Steinman’s tumor served as minifactories for the production of his  cancer and also as his patient-avatars in the lab. When one of Mellman’s  drugs showed promise in a dish — a signaling inhibitor called  vismodegib — he sent it for a trial in the cancer-ridden mice. When they  responded, too, Steinman took it himself. It did not appear to work.         
Still, years went by and Steinman’s disease never spread far enough to  kill him. Was it just the chemotherapy that kept his tumor growth in  check? Or had his custom-made vaccines acted in more subtle ways? It’s  now well known that immunotherapies can linger in the body even as a tumor grows,  and then start to shrink the tumor later on. It’s also possible that  the vaccines and chemo worked in concert. But with no other patients for  comparison and so little time between treatments to let the data run  their course, the details remained a mystery. Mellman expressed  skepticism about the treatment’s efficacy. Schlesinger was more  positive, as was Coit, his surgeon. “I mean, look at his course,” Coit  said. “The average survival even after a complete resection is measured  in months, maybe a year and a half, and yet he kept going and going and  going. You can’t help wondering if some of it had to do with this very  innovative, novel approach.” As for Steinman himself, he wouldn’t make a  claim one way or the other. “He totally, definitely felt that it was  helping him,” says his daughter Alexis, but feeling is different from  knowing. Though he kept careful notes about his treatment and joked with  Schlesinger of writing up his one-man trial for The New England Journal  of Medicine — in a case study titled “My Tumor and How I Solved It” —  in the end there wasn’t any proof.        
“Ralph was this remarkable mixture of optimism and skepticism,” Mellman  says. “He always knew how this was going to end, and that he was living  on borrowed time.”        
At her mother’s suggestion, Alexis Steinman flew to New York, on Sept.  11, 2011, and found her father in a sickly state. For the first time  since he had the disease, Steinman had begun to deteriorate. He was  coughing so violently, her mother had told her, that she thought he  might have broken a rib.        
Alone with Alexis, Steinman said: “I have cancer in my bones.” Until  then, he lived with his disease in much the way he lived before: working  long days in the lab and long nights at his computer; traveling to  conferences around the world; treating the lab to Entenmann’s cake. Now,  for the first time since his diagnosis, he started losing hope in his  treatment plan. He became depressed.        
The cancer had stopped responding to gemcitabine, and his CA19-9  readings were out of control. On Sept. 18, he tried one more drug — a  targeted therapy that had shown some very modest benefits and seemed  well suited to his case, at least according to the data from his cancer  genome. But it was too late; the disease had already spread throughout  his body.        
Steinman started planning for the end. “You know how they have those  events in the Caspary” — the auditorium at Rockefeller University —  “where somebody comes and plays classical music and they talk about  you?” he asked Claudia. “I don’t want any of that.” He also told her  that there should be no sitting shiva on his behalf. (“I don’t want  people coming to the house for seven days,” he said.) Then he met with  his closest friend at Rockefeller, a former grad student named Michel  Nussenzweig. They discussed what would happen to Steinman’s students and  his postdocs. Some he called himself, apologizing for leaving them  before their work was done.        
On the night of Sept. 24, Steinman ate dinner with his family in a  faculty apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Claudia was  there, and their three children and three grandchildren, too. The next  morning, sitting on his bed, Alexis saw that he was finding it very hard  to breathe. “I think I need to go to the hospital,” he announced. When  they arrived at Sloan-Kettering to see his oncologist, he said, “I don’t  think I’m getting out of here.”        
He died five days later.        
On a sunny day last August, almost one year after Steinman won the Nobel  Prize, I saw his tumor for myself. Its cells were plastered to the  bottom of a plastic case, 20 million tiny cancers crowded into a space  the size of a large matchbox. A few days before my visit, the cancer was  taken out of the freezer and left to thaw. As I peered at the last  living remnants of Steinman’s body through a low-power scope, Sara Solt,  a lab technician at Johns Hopkins, gave me her assessment: “Those  handlike substances,” she said, referring to some spears of cytoplasm,  “they almost look mean.”        
For someone who has never seen a pancreatic cancer cell, though,  Steinman’s disease didn’t look so mean at all — not black or jagged,  just a bunch of soft-edged pentagons and distorted squares, with a few  translucent tendrils jutting from their membranes.        
The lab at Hopkins is run by Elizabeth Jaffee, the expert on vaccines  for pancreatic cancer who received a part of the tumor for analysis. The  vaccine she is testing in the clinic matches one of those Steinman  received: it mixes bits of tumor — targets for the patient’s immune  response — with a signal that recruits dendritic cells. As we sat  together in her office, Jaffee reviewed what remains unknown about the  method. It’s not yet clear how best to pick those targets.  Steinman could have used a more standardized approach, with certain  proteins preselected to maximize response; instead, he went with samples  of his own disease, hoping these would give his dendritic cells  something more to go on. But his tumor might have yielded a thousand  targets for his T-cells, a protein soup swimming with red herrings. We  still don’t know which strategy works best, Jaffee told me.        
There’s another challenge, too, that Steinman had little chance to work  around. Any cancer that has grown big enough to harm your health is one  that has already figured out a way to hinder any T-cells that come after  it. It has evolved a path around the body’s natural defenses. So it  stands to reason that if you want to make an immune-based treatment  work, you have to add in some other tumor-fighting drug, one that  counteracts the tumor’s schemes for keeping immunity in check. “Vaccines  alone are not going to be enough,” Jaffee said. “When in cancer,  especially metastatic cancer, has one agent ever cured anybody? It  doesn’t do it.”        
Scientists have only just begun to understand how a tumor can shield  itself from T-cells and to make a set of drugs that work against those  mechanisms. When Steinman began his treatment, he and others in the  field knew of one drug, called ipilimumab, that could do just this.  Taken on its own, the drug appeared to extend the lives of patients with  metastatic melanoma by months or even years. Yet the company that makes  it, Bristol-Myers Squibb, was trying hard to get approval for  single-agent use and wouldn’t allow Steinman to pair the drug with his  vaccines. Researchers may have worried that the untested combination  could have side effects that would delay its approval. (Citing company  policy against discussing individual cases, Bristol-Myers declined to  comment on Steinman’s treatment.) So Steinman tried the drug on its own  in 2010. Instead of charging up his immune cells to fight off the  pancreatic cancer, it knocked his T-cells into overdrive. They attacked  his intestines and his pituitary gland, leading to dehydration and  diarrhea. He ended up in the hospital.        
“One of the problems we have in our field is that it’s very hard to  combine two agents,” Jaffee said, referring to the bureaucratic hurdles  she has faced in using ipilimumab. When she put the drug together with  one of the vaccines that Steinman received, both treatments were  enhanced. More than a fourth of those enrolled in her preliminary trial  for pancreatic cancer — patients who expected to live for two or three  months on average — have now survived for at least a year. Even so,  Jaffee had trouble getting enough doses from Bristol-Myers Squibb to  start a second, bigger test. The company eventually agreed, after  ipilimumab was approved by the F.D.A., but the whole process set her  research back by a couple of years. “This is my biggest frustration,”  she said.        
The same was true for Steinman. As the years went by, he was confronted  time and again with the limits of what was understood and what was  possible. He hoped to integrate his vaccines with chemotherapy and take  the treatments simultaneously rather than in sequence. Jaffee’s lab has  shown that this approach can enhance the immune response in a different  way than ipilimumab does, by killing off a kind of T-cell that’s  friendly to a tumor. Or else he might have combined the immunotherapies  with drugs selected on the basis of his tumor’s DNA. But no one really  knows how best to put these things together, just as no one really knows  which antigens a vaccine should target nor how best to mobilize  dendritic cells. Scientists now realize that dendritic cells come in  dozens of different forms, some of which may be more effective in  vaccines than others.        
The disconnect between the extraordinary promise of cancer  immunotherapies and the vagaries of their application, between the  possible and the merely doable, always bothered Steinman. He used to  tell his family that his work on dendritic cells might not be relevant  until long after he was dead — that it would take years to determine  whether vaccines based on his discovery could truly be effective in the  treatment of disease. “All of this stuff was literally developing in  real time as Ralph’s disease was developing,” Mellman says, “and the  disease was ahead, unfortunately.” If Steinman’s personalized treatments  worked at all, it was in spite of everything that was still unknown.  “It was a laboratory experiment that worked for a while, we think, but  we can’t go back and repeat it, so we’ll never know for sure,” Mellman  says.        
More experiments are on the horizon. Jaffee is building on Steinman’s  work by combining the latest round of immune boosters with a  dendritic-cell vaccine. There is progress in immunotherapy for other  cancers, too: ipilimumab is being used for treating melanoma, and  related drugs are in the pipeline that make a tumor more vulnerable to  attack. In 2011, The New England Journal of Medicine published the  results of a method known as “adoptive T-cell transfer,”  in which T-cells are extracted from the body and reprogrammed to go  after cancer cells. This has proved a potent treatment for some patients  with advanced leukemia, but it poses greater health risks than the  vaccines that rely on dendritic cells. “We’re going to learn a lot over  the next 10 years,” Jaffee said, as we walked through the lab. “We’re  just at the beginning. This is going to be the start of a whole new  field.”        
Steinman knew he wouldn’t live to see that field reach its full  potential. It has been almost 40 years since he discovered the dendritic  cell, and doctors have only now begun to make immunotherapies that  work. By all accounts, that sluggish pace was deeply frustrating to  Steinman, even before he got sick. “His mind went so fast, and he always  wanted everything done yesterday,” Schlesinger says. Years ago, the two  of them were on their way to their lab, and Steinman was in a foul mood  because a trial they hoped to run was taking longer than expected.  After some back and forth about the details, he stopped to consider what  he had accomplished in his long career. “He said to me, ‘You know, all  this time has gone by, and we haven’t cured cancer or found a vaccine  for H.I.V.’ ” And then he paused, and told her, “We’ve got to get to  work.”        
 
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