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November 15 - Charles Graeber with Dr. Thomas Gajewski

The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer

Charles Graeber, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Nurse, details the astonishing scientific discovery of the code to unleashing the human immune system to fight — and possibly even cure — cancer.

For decades, scientists have puzzled over one of medicine’s most confounding mysteries: Why doesn’t our immune system recognize and fight cancer the way it does other diseases, like the common cold?

As it turns out, the answer to that question can be traced to a series of tricks that cancer has developed to turn off normal immune responses-tricks that scientists have only recently discovered and learned to defeat. The result is what many are calling cancer’s “penicillin moment,” a revolutionary discovery in our understanding of cancer and how to beat it.

In THE BREAKTHROUGH, Graeber guides readers through the revolutionary scientific research bringing immunotherapy out of the realm of the miraculous and into the forefront of twenty-first-century medical science. As advances in the fields of cancer research and the human immune system continue to fuel a therapeutic arms race among biotech and pharmaceutical research centers around the world, the next step-harnessing the wealth of new information to create modern and more effective patient therapies-is unfolding at an unprecedented pace, rapidly redefining our relationship with this all-too-human disease.

Groundbreaking, riveting, and expertly told, THE BREAKTHROUGH is the story of the game-changing scientific discoveries that unleash our natural ability to recognize and defeat cancer, as told through the experiences of the patients, physicians, and cancer immunotherapy researchers who are on the front lines. This is the incredible true story of the race to find a cure, a dispatch from the life-changing world of modern oncological science, and a brave new chapter in medical history.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:

Thomas Gajewski, MD, PhD is Professor in the Departments of Pathology and Medicine. He oversees the melanoma oncology clinic, is Leader of the Immunology and Cancer Program at the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center and directs the Human Immunologic Monitoring core facility.

His laboratory studies the molecular and cellular regulation of T lymphocyte activation and differentiation, and in turn applies this information to preclinical and clinical efforts to promote anti-tumor immunity in vivo. Dr. Gajewski is committed to investigating and developing new treatments for patients with melanoma, with a special interest in the development of immunotherapies against the disease. He also leads development of immune-based therapies for other cancers, using new laboratory data on how the immune system is regulated to develop novel clinical trials.

Dr. Gajewski has published more than 200 papers on these subjects, has served on numerous NIH grant review panels, is an editor for Cancer Research and Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer, is on the Program Committees for the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), and is past president of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer. He was recently awarded the first American Cancer Society-Jules L. Plangere Jr. Family Foundation Professorship in Cancer Immunotherapy.

As his laboratory work leads to new potential immunotherapies for cancer, Dr. Gajewski is involved with several early biotech companies. He scientific co-founder of Jounce Therapeutics, and has licensing arrangements with Aduro Biotech and Evelo, a new company focused on the microbiome and cancer.

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December 6, 2018 - Doris Kearns Goodwin with A. Scott Berg

KENTUCKY AUTHOR FORUM IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE ALI CENTER PROUDLY PRESENT:

Thursday, December 6, 2018

Doris Kearns Goodwin with A. Scott Berg

Thursday, December 6, 2018

Kentucky Center – 6-8:15 p.m.

Dinner to follow at Ali Center – 8:30

Thursday, December 7, 2018

Muhammad Ali Center

Daughters of Greatness Breakfast Series – 8:30am-10:00am

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a world-renowned presidential historian, public speaker and Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times #1 best-selling author. Goodwin is known for her highly regarded studies of American presidents. A meeting with Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 resulted in Goodwin’s first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. Her second book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, was a best-seller. Following the release of No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, Goodwin published a memoir detailing her youth in Brooklyn. She returned to presidential literature thereafter, releasing Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln in 2005. Leadership in Turbulent Times is a culmination of five decades of acclaimed studies in presidential history, and offers an illuminating exploration into the early development, growth, and exercise of leadership.

Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the man make the times or do the times make the man?

In Leadership in Turbulent Times, Goodwin draws upon four of the presidents she has studied most closely—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights)—to show how they first recognized leadership qualities within themselves, and were recognized by others as leaders.

Among her many honors and awards, Goodwin was awarded the Charles Frankel Prize, given by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal, the New England Book Award, as well as the Carl Sandburg Literary Award.

Goodwin lives in Concord, Massachusetts. She was the first woman to enter the Boston Red Sox locker room, and is a devoted fan of the World Series-winning team.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:

Scott Berg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of five bestselling biographies. They include: Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, which won the National Book Award; Goldwyn, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship; Lindbergh, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Biography; Kate Remembered, a biographical memoir of his friendship with Katharine Hepburn; and, most recently, a biography of America’s 28th President, Wilson. He has occasionally worked on both feature and documentary films and has written for several magazines—Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, and Smithsonian among them. A Charter Trustee of Princeton University, he lives in Los Angeles, CA.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

DAUGHTERS OF GREATNESS: DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN

December 7, 2018

8:30 am – 10:00 am

Muhammad Ali Center

www.alicenter.org

Throughout the year, the Daughters of Greatness breakfast series invites prominent women engaged in social philanthropy, activism, and pursuits of justice to share their stories with the Louisville community. The Daughters of Greatness series provides a place for dialogue and discussion on current issues of justice, community engagement, and social movements within the Louisville area and beyond.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a world-renowned presidential historian, public speaker and Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times #1 best-selling author.

Her seventh book, Leadership in Turbulent Times is the culmination of Goodwin’s five-decade career of studying the American presidents. The book delivers an illuminating exploration into the early development, growth, and exercise of leadership as exemplified by Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. It provides an accessible and essential road map for aspiring and established leaders in every field and for all of us in our everyday lives.

For reservations and to purchase tickets (need link to this page):

https://alicenter.org/programs/daughters-of-greatness/

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The University of Louisville Kentucky Author Forum is a non-profit, nationally-recognized literary event. Author Forum programs carefully match an author and interviewer; their hour-long candid conversation takes place before a live audience at The Kentucky Center in Louisville. The event is taped and distributed by KET, Kentucky Educational Television, and airs as the series “Great Conversations” on PBS member stations across the country.

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