Arlene Sharpe's Science Helps Cancer Patients, And 'It Doesn't Get Better Than That'

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The chair of Harvard's new immunology department helped pioneer the science behind the most promising new type of cancer treatment in decades –– and it all began with lima beans in the living room. WBUR

Arlene Sharpe, right, watches as Graduate Student Emily Gaudiano removes a rack of samples of cancer cell lines from mice from a freezer at the Sharpe Laboratory at Harvard Medical School. In second grade, in Gary, Indiana, her science fair project showing the lima bean's stages of germination won a special note from the school principal. She still has it today, at age 65.

She grew particularly curious about the workings of disease. Her mother was sick for most of her childhood. That was back in the ‘70s, but Strominger still remembers her fondly."Arlene is one of my favorites," he says,"I think because she's such a modest person." And so was born what Freeman calls “the family business.” He's now a professor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard. The “family business” was trying to understand the genes that control the immune system. Freeman would clone them, and Sharpe would use a tool that was new back then, called gene knockout, to eliminate them and see what they did.

"Scientifically, the understanding of these negative receptor molecules, these brakes in the immune system, was hugely important," says Manchester University immunology professor Daniel Davis, author of".""And medically, it became hugely important when it was realized that you could unleash the immune response against cancer."

"You know, I never say that I'm cured, I always say that I'm healed," he says. He has personally thanked Sharpe and Freeman for his reprieve, he says,"because my healing came from God, but he blessedwith the technology and the idea of how to put all this together so that it would bless other people all around the world."

 

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