For Physicians: Immunotherapy

The University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center (UMGCCC) is a national leader in pioneering advancements in immunotherapy for patients with advanced cancers.

UMGCCC was one of the first medical centers in the country to offer new immunotherapies like chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy. For over 30 years, our transplant and cellular therapy team has performed thousands of stem cell transplants, accepting challenging cases that other programs turned away. UMGCCC is also a leader in solid tumor treatment and research, made possible due to our advancements with blood cancers. 

UMGCCC'S Immunotherapy Resources

• Since opening in 2018, the Fannie Angelos Cellular Therapeutics Laboratory (FACT Lab) provides UMGCCC researchers an on-site lab setting, accelerating research and testing for immune-based strategies. 
• UMGCCC’s Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy Program is dedicated to understanding the immune regulation of malignant diseases and developing treatment regimens to treat them. The program’s research falls under three themes: cell-based cancer immunotherapies, inhibiting immunosuppression and cancer and inflammation.
• Our transplant and cellular therapy team includes internationally and nationally recognized leaders in the field, raising the standards of treatment for leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma and similar diseases.

Immunotherapy Clinical Trials and Research

• UMGCCC offers a number of clinical trials exploring tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy (TIL) as a breakthrough treatment for advanced solid tumors, including assessing the safety and efficacy of TIL therapy as both monotherapy and as part of combination therapy to treat melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer and cervical cancer.
• Our researchers are among an initial group of 14 academic centers studying precision medicine’s effect on acute myeloid leukemia treatment in older patients. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Association–sponsored trial examines the feasibility and efficacy of guiding treatment decisions with prospective genetic profiling.
• UMGCCC was one of the first centers (and only one in the Baltimore-Washington-Virginia area) to offer Yescarta, the CAR-T cell therapy that targets B-cell lymphoma. The therapy comes with serious side effects but has removed cancer from patients who previously failed other therapies.
• Our study of the effect of CAR-T therapy as a second-line treatment on B-cell lymphoma showed increased survival rates and higher response to treatment. That’s a significant development for patients with large B-cell lymphoma that does not respond to chemotherapy, or who relapse less than a year after chemotherapy, because they have a historically poor survival rate.

Access our clinical trials database for details on related trials.