Nicholas P. Restifo

Dr. Restifo was born in Columbus, Ohio. He grew up in a small town, Amherst, Ohio, and went to high school in Lorain, Ohio. He completed his undergraduate education with honors at the Johns Hopkins University and obtained his medical degree from New York University School of Medicine. He first joined the National Cancer Institute, NIH in Bethesda, Maryland in 1989. He was recruited from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he worked in the laboratory of Murray Brennan, the former chairman of Surgery. He became a principal investigator [2] in 1993 and has authored or co-authored more than 300 papers and book chapters on cancer immunotherapy.[3]

Dr. Restifo's most recent efforts include a focus on how elements – literally from the periodic table – influence cancer immunity. These include work on how oxygen can inhibit anti-tumor immunity [4] and how potassium ions from dying cancer cells can shut down the anti-tumor response.[5]

Successful treatment of patients with cancer is the goal of his laboratory, and his therapeutic approaches employ adoptive T cell transfer, gene modification and cellular reprogramming.[6] Basic aspects of tumor and T cell immunology inform novel therapeutic interventions in the clinic.

Restifo and his research team have made contributions to the fields of adoptive cell transfer[7] tumor immune-escape,[8][9] virally encoded cancer vaccines,[10] adoptive cell transfer for the treatment of cancer, and the biology of self/tumor-reactive T cells, with an emphasis on memory CD8+ T cells.[11]

• Cytotoxic T cell
• interleukin 15
• memory t cell
• Cish