How Ralph Steinman Raced to Develop a Cancer Vaccine--And Save His Life (preview)

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When Ralph M. Steinman developed pancreatic cancer, he put his own theories about cancer and the immune system to the test. They kept him alive longer than expected?but three days short of learning he had won the Nobel Prize

By Katherine Harmon ?| December 20, 2011

Image: Illustration by Roberto Parada

In Brief

• Ralph M. Steinman was the first person to describe dendritic cells, which play a key role in initiating immune responses. He named them for their treelike limbs.
• Dendritic cells, which ?teach? other immune cells what to attack, now make up the core of many experimental vaccines against cancer and HIV.
• When Steinman was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, he and a network of colleagues turned to these new vaccines to treat his disease.
• His colleagues believe the vaccines helped to extend his life well beyond the norm. He died just three days before winning the Nobel Prize.

Peering through a microscope at a plate of cells one day, Ralph M. Steinman spied something no one had ever seen before. It was the early 1970s, and he was a researcher at the Rockefeller University on Manhattan?s Upper East Side. At the time, scientists were still piecing together the basic building blocks of the immune system. They had figured out that there are B cells, white blood cells that help to identify foreign invaders, and T cells, another type of white blood cell that attacks those invaders. What puzzled them, however, was what triggered those T cells and B cells to go to work in the first place. Steinman glimpsed what he thought might be the missing piece: strange, spindly-armed cells unlike any he had ever noticed.

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