You may not know this, but you may be a cancer survivor. What do I mean by that? It turns out the very act of living, of growing, is associated with DNA replication. And while DNA can replicate with high fidelity, sometimes there are errors or mutations in our genomes. Now, usually that happens in safe spaces in our genomes, where it doesn't have an impact, but sometimes that happens in the very genes that drive tumor growth and development. When that happens, cancer can develop. So why don't we have cancer? Our T cells that are trained to distinguish viruses in bacteria or circulating throughout our system, and they are trained to distinguish cell from non-self. This is a healthy cell, this is an infected cell. When it turns out, T cells can also distinguish cancer cells from healthy cells. To a T cell, these cancer cells look like a virus. As a result, our T cells may be killing off tumor cells again and again. But cancer evolves to evade the immune response. It can become invisible, like the invisibility cloak of Harry Potter, and can sit right next to a T cell without being seen. In the spring of 2010, my field of cancer immunology all changed. That was the first time in a large-scale clinical study that it was shown that immune therapies that just activate T cells can impact the lives of patients with molybeth melanoma. Now, cancer immunotherapy is now commonly used across many different cancer types. So what we found is that the cancer cells that are most mutated, that are most altered, that are most aggressive, are also the ones that are most visible to T cells. So imagine these T cells chasing down the tumor cells and killing them. So now we can sequence those tumors. We can identify the changes in the cancer cells. We can develop vaccines in T cell immune therapies to try to target the very changes that are happening within those tumors. From leukemia's to breast cancers, we're just harnessing what was there all along. So one of the challenges is that every cancer is different. My lung cancer may be different than your lung cancer. My immune system may react differently than your immune system, and differently than my twin. So we have to be very precise in how we develop these immune therapies. My laboratory develops ways to look at the breadth and the specificity of the immune response to cancer. How can we target it? How can we use it? How can we deliver it? Can we even do without chemotherapy? Is this the year that all changes again?