Lisa Butterfield on SITC Immune Biomarkers Task Force

Lisa Butterfield, PhD, professor of Medicine, Surgery and Immunology, director, University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute Immunologic Monitoring and Cellular Products Laboratory, University of Pittsburgh, discusses the goals of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Immune Biomarkers Task Force during an interview at the SITC 31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs. Butterfield is president of SITC.

The SITC Immune Biomarkers Task Force is comprised of experts in the field with a purpose to review the current state of the science, identify current challenges to advance the field, and make recommendations regarding biomarkers for immunotherapy agents. This is an initiative that has been a focus for SITC since 2000 to identify biomarkers, technologies, validation, and standardization, as well as approaches to determine which patients should enroll on a clinical trial, and who will benefit or be resistant to such therapies. This has been a huge undertaking, Butterfield explains.

The Task Force is also looking to discover what the most promising new technologies are, which ones should be used, and what evidence-based data are available to support their use. This initiative takes a holisitc approach to understanding hot versus cold tumors, tumor micronenvironment, DNA, RNA, sequencing, and more.