John M. Kirkwood, MD, is the Usher Professor of Medicine, Dermatology &
Translational Science and director of the Melanoma and Skin Cancer Program,
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
Dr Kirkwood’s pioneering work with biological treatments for melanoma provided
the first adjuvant therapy for treating patients with high-risk melanoma
in 1996 and he has led immunotherapy development in cancer for the past 45
years, beginning decades before immunotherapy had reached the limelight it
has achieved in melanoma and other solid tumors over the past 5 years.
He is leading several highly promising clinical trials with cancer vaccines
that use biological response modifiers to spur the body’s immune system to
recognize and destroy melanoma.
He is now pioneering new approaches to the assessment of combinations of
recently approved new immunotherapies and molecular therapies that are anticipated
to be the focus of the next decade of clinical translational research.
In Dr Kirkwood’s laboratory, metastatic and locoregional tumor tissues from
patients participating in new combination therapies, neoadjuvant trials, and
prevention interventions are examined with a focus on the alterations in immunomodulatory
STAT signaling pathways and effector immune responses.
He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the American
Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Association for Cancer Research,
the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group, the Society for Immunotherapy
of Cancer, the Society for Melanoma Research, the Clinical Immunology
Society, and the Society of Natural Immunity.