Ronald Levy

Stanford University


Primary Section: 43, Immunology and Inflammation
Secondary Section: 41, Medical Genetics, Hematology, and Oncology
Membership Type:
Member (elected 2008)

Biosketch

Ronald Levy, M.D., is Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. He has pioneered the use of the immune system to treat cancer. His major discovery was the use of monoclonal antibodies for this purpose.  As a result, millions of people with lymphoma and other cancers are now surviving.  Levy is a cancer doctor, a basic scientist and a translational researcher.  In 1981 he opened the field of monoclonal antibody therapy for cancer.  First he showed that antibodies could be custom made for each patient with lymphoma. His first patient was treated successfully and lived for over 35 years free of his lymphoma. Levy then went on to help develop Rituximab, the first monoclonal antibody approved by the FDA for cancer, and thereby changed the paradigm of treatment for cancer worldwide.  As a result of his work an industry sprung up to generate new and increasingly more effective versions of monoclonal antibodies that are being used today for leukemia, breast cancer, colon cancer, brain cancer and childhood cancers.  

Research Interests

Most recently he and his group have injected these immune enhancing antibodies directly into the cancer to activate the local immune system enabling it to fight cancer throughout the body, a maneuver called in situ therapeutic vaccination. He looks forward to the day when therapy for cancer will be smarter, more effective and with less side effects.  He plans to combine therapies that turn off the survival switches inside cancer cells together with therapies that active the immune system to seek out and destroy cancer throughout the body.

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