Stand Up for Science launches part four of Traces Thursday on cancer immunotherapy

Stand Up for Science released the fourth installment of its Traces Thursday series on Sept. 17, 2026, focusing on the decades of basic research that led to cancer immunotherapy. The piece argues the field shows why long-term federal science funding matters, especially as Congress debates biomedical research support.

Why it matters: - Cancer immunotherapy is now used against dozens of cancer types and is one of the biggest oncology advances of the past decade. - The story highlights how basic research can produce treatments years later, even when the original work is not aimed at making a drug. - The example lands amid debate over federal science funding, where long-term biomedical research often does not show results within a single grant cycle.

What happened: - Stand Up for Science released part four of its “Traces Thursday” series on Sept. 17, 2026. - The new installment, “Harnessing the Immune System to Treat Cancer,” examines how scientists learned to turn the immune system’s natural cancer-fighting abilities into a treatment strategy. - The series is written by Dr. Jeremy Berg, who is a former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIH and a former editor-in-chief of Science magazine. - Berg is also a member of the Board of Advisors with Stand Up for Science.

The details: - The human immune system already detects and eliminates abnormal cells before they become cancer. - Scientists later learned that some tumors can disable the body’s natural response and keep T cells from attacking. - In the 1990s, researchers identified a protein linked to T cells, the immune system’s attack cells. - About a decade later, scientists found another protein that can tell T cells to stand down. - Those discoveries led to pembrolizumab, sold as Keytruda. - Pembrolizumab was approved in 2014 for metastatic melanoma. - In 2020, the FDA approved pembrolizumab for any cancer type with a high mutation burden, a regulatory first. - The drug is now a standard part of modern cancer treatment. - Berg said the work shows what long-term, curiosity-driven research can produce.

Between the lines: - The breakthrough was not a new weapon against cancer. It was figuring out how tumors evade the immune system. - The series frames medical progress as the end result of decades, sometimes centuries, of foundational research. - That message is meant to bolster the case for sustained public investment in basic science, especially when payoffs are hard to measure quickly.

What's next: - Stand Up for Science will publish subsequent Traces Thursday posts on the Science Fight Club Substack each Thursday. - Berg is available for comment. - The series is planned as a 12-part weekly run.

The bottom line: - Cancer immunotherapy shows how patient, curiosity-driven research can become a standard cancer treatment years later.