Targeting the mechanisms cancers share to stop progression and reverse disease
The cancer immunotherapy revolution began at Berkeley, when fundamental curiosity about how immune cells are activated led to the discovery of immune checkpoint inhibitors, therapies that have since helped thousands of patients with previously untreatable cancers. Yet cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the United States, claiming more than 600,000 lives a year, and many cancers still evade, exhaust, or never trigger an immune response. The patients those therapies fail are often left with the fewest options and the least time.
CURED goes upstream, harnessing foundational immunology to uncover the shared principles of immune activation and suppression rather than the vulnerabilities of any single cancer. That focus on shared mechanism is what makes it possible to pursue approaches that could treat many cancer types with one or a few therapies, rather than a separate treatment for each.
The questions driving this work are ones conventional oncology has not answered:
What CURED Cancer is investigating:
Activating the immune system against cancers it would otherwise ignore
Some cancers never trigger an immune response at all. Using STING agonists, bacteria and bacterial components, and the activation of stress pathways including the unfolded protein response and the DNA damage response, CURED researchers are driving broad antitumor immunity against tumors the immune system would otherwise overlook.
Dismantling the defenses tumors build to protect themselves
Many tumors actively suppress the immune cells sent to destroy them. By targeting the mechanisms that shut down CD8 T cells, CD4 T cells, and NK cells and allow cancers to resist conventional immunotherapy, CURED is learning to strip away those defenses and expose the tumor to the full force of the immune system.
Reversing the dysfunction that causes immune cells to give up
Even activated immune cells often exhaust before the work is done. By modifying T and NK cell signaling pathways, identifying new checkpoint inhibitors, and developing superkine therapies, CURED is working to sustain immune activity against cancer over time.
The connective thread
The questions this pillar asks reach well beyond cancer: why the immune system fails to see a threat, what switches its cells off, and how a response can be sustained long enough to succeed. The same curiosity that asks why immune cells stand down inside a tumor leads our colleagues to ask why the immune system turns against the body’s own tissue, why it cannot clear a chronic infection, or how a single inherited variant can unravel an entire biological system. Immune activation and suppression are a shared language across all four of CURED’s pillars, and the Center is built to study them together.
