The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer

The 2018 Nobel Prize was awarded to researchers who helped answer one of medicine's most confounding questions: Why do we know whenever we get a cold or a flu because of the immune defense symptoms, but need a test to know when we have cancer? The answer is what many are calling cancer's "penicillin moment," a revolutionary discovery in our understanding of cancer and how to beat it. In THE BREAKTHROUGH, Graeber guides readers through the revolutionary scientific research bringing immunotherapy out of the realm of the miraculous and into the forefront of twenty-first-century medical science. As advances in the fields of cancer research and the human immune system continue to fuel a therapeutic arms race among biotech and pharmaceutical research centers around the world, the next step-harnessing the wealth of new information to create modern and more effective patient therapies-is unfolding at an unprecedented pace, rapidly redefining our relationship with this all-too-human disease. Groundbreaking, riveting, and expertly told, THE BREAKTHROUGH is the story of the game-changing scientific discoveries that unleash our natural ability to recognize and defeat cancer, as told through the experiences of the patients, physicians, and cancer immunotherapy researchers who are on the front lines. This is the incredible true story of the race to find a cure, a dispatch from the life-changing world of modern oncological science, and a brave new chapter in medical history.