-: So my name is Renee Donahue.
I'm a staff scientist at the National Cancer Institute
at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
I work in the laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology,
which is a translational research program,
composed of seven pre-clinical groups,
and we work very closely with the Clinical Trials group.
I lead one of those seven groups,
and my team, especially, works very close
with the Clinical Trials team.
We're looking to, basically,
examine the immune responses of patients
that are enrolled in our clinical trials
at the NCI.
And we're looking, basically,
for correlates or things that associate
with clinical responses of patients
or things that associate with the development
of adverse events in these patients.
I like to be in the lab as much as I can,
but I have to rely heavily on my team
to sort of move things along.
So, day in and day out I'm designing experiments,
analyzing data with my team,
putting together presentations, writing papers.
There's a lot of meetings with our oncologists
where we're sort of looking to
design and refine protocols that are planned
in the future.
One of the really cool things
that we get to do in the lab is
we do a lot of first in human studies.
So these are trials where agents
that have only been tested pre-clinically
and have never been in people are actually put in patients.
For example, the Phase 1 study of Avelumab,
which is an anti-PD-L1 antibody
that's capable of mediating ADCC,
and there was a lot of concern raised about that
because there was concern that we might deplete immune cells
that express this target.
So my lab was involved in sort of
looking extensively at the immune responses
of patients enrolled in this trial and was able to show
that we did not deplete PD-L1 expressing subsets.
And that's really exciting for us
because this agent has since gone on
to be approved by the FDA for two indications.