This TED Talk features immunologist Carl June, recorded live at TEDmed 2018.

So this is the first time I've told this story in public, the personal aspects of it.

And Yogi Berra was a world famous baseball player who said, if you come to a fork in the road, take it.

Researchers have been, you know, for more than a century,

studying the immune system as a way to fight cancer.

And cancer vaccines have unfortunately been disappointing.

They've only worked in cancers caused by viruses

like cervical

cancer or liver cancer. So cancer researchers basically gave up on the idea of using the immune

system to fight cancer. And the immune system in any case did not evolve to fight cancer.

It evolved to fight pathogens invading from the outside.

So its job is to kill bacteria and viruses. And the reason the immune system has trouble with

most cancers is that it doesn't evade from the outside. It evolves from its own cells.

And so either immune system does not recognize the cancer as a problem,

or it attacks a cancer and also our normal cells,

leading to autoimmune diseases like colitis or multiple sclerosis.

So how do you get around that?

Our answer turned out to be synthetic immune systems

that are designed to recognize and kill cancer cells.

So that's right, I said, a synthetic immune system.

You do that with genetic engineering and synthetic biology.

We did it with the naturally occurring

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