It rebuilds the immune cells in the body to become cancer killers

Immunotherapies of various types are now seen as increasingly prominent in cancer care. This was not the case when Magnus Eisand began his career.

He received his doctorate in 1995 with a thesis on antibodies and cancer. It is a good example of the change that has occurred in the area. According to prevailing thinking at the time, his thesis was about targeting antibodies against cancer cells. Today, most research focuses on immune cells, which Magnus Eisand became interested in early on.

-I was also doing immunotherapy when it didn't work during the 1990s and early 2000s. He says that immunologists have always believed that the immune system should be able to do some job against cancer, but in oncology people have been very skeptical.

“He looks like a James Bond villain.”

When Magnus Eisand became professor of gene therapy in the Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology in 2009, many people did not understand what he was doing at all.

– She was the first professor of gene therapy in Sweden, and then I got comments: “Oh, that looks like a James Bond villain.”

Skepticism in his field of research changed about ten years ago. That's when American researcher James Allison discovered that it was possible to block the body's T-cell control system and thus make them able to fight cancer cells – a feat that was rewarded with a Nobel Prize in 2018. Suddenly, immunotherapy was very hot.

Molecular engineer

Magnus Essand likens himself to a molecular engineer. In addition to designing CAR-T cells, he is also building so-called oncolytic viruses that have been modified to be able to infect and kill cancer cells without harming healthy tissue in the body. A study will soon be completed in which one of its oncolytic viruses will be tested in patients with neuroendocrine tumors that can affect, for example, the lungs, pancreas and small intestine.