Dear Patients, their Family Members, Research Participants, and Friends:

As 2024 drew to a close, I attended the 101st annual meeting of the Clinical Society of Genitourinary Surgeons held at Stanford University.

Doctor Carolyn Bertozzi, a guest speaker at the conference and the subject of our Feature QUEST article, gave a brilliant, inspirational lecture. She related how she and her students set out to discover how sugar molecules coating the surfaces of living cells could be imaged and found that they served to ward off the attack of cancer cells by the immune system. They ultimately arrived at a possible new basis for cancer immunotherapy.

This new approach may be practical for many of the 50 percent of cancer cases that currently fail to respond to the existing immunotherapy treatments. In this regard, prostate cancer has been notoriously resistant to immunotherapy. Dr. Bertozzi started by manipulating century-old organic chemical reactions, leading to a new form of chemistry she called “bioorthogonal chemistry.”

She received the Nobel Prize in 2022 for this seminal work she performed in her thirties. Her team discovered that the virtual jungle of sugars that coat cancer cells protects them from immune systemattacks. Using the field of “bioorthogonal” chemistry, in which chemical reactions canoccur within living cells without side effects, her research team developed a method of “mowing” the interfering surface sugar molecules, rendering the cancer cells vulnerable to immune attack. This novel approach is now being tested in human clinical trials.