Immunotherapy as a cancer treatment

In an interview with dvm360 at the Directions in Veterinary Medicine symposium in Nashville, Tennessee, Michael D. Lucroy, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Oncology), chief medical officer of Torigen Inc, explains immunotherapy and how it can be used alongside surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.

The following is a partial transcript of the video.

Michael D. Lucroy, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Oncology): I'm Mike Lucroy. I'm currently the chief medical officer at Torgien and pharmaceuticals and I'm a board certified oncologist.

As far as immunotherapy goes, we kind of think about classically 3 pillars of managing our cancer patients. So the idea of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. But in the last several decades, there's been a lot of innovation and understanding how the immune system helps, as far as you know, managing cancer, but also how it gets in the way of managing a cancer patient. And so what our company is working on now is an idea of creating a vaccine from the patient's own tumor tissue to provide essentially a menu of cancer antigens to help train the immune system that are really individual to that particular cancer patient.