Can your immune system really cure cancer?

Raising the Bar

Can your immune system really cure cancer? by Rod Dunbar

The Oakroom

Raising the Bar Auckland

Raising the Bar Auckland is back on Tuesday 26 August, 2025, with 20 free talks at 10 venues. 

Get your free tickets today and join us for a night of innovation and inspiration!

<h3>Talk Description</h3><p>Cancer has proven a tricky beast to tame, but immune therapy seems capable of restraining it, and sometimes even killing it off completely. So what does this mean for the future of cancer care? Could immune therapy help more people with advanced cancer? And could we use this therapy much earlier to prevent cancers from bouncing back – or even to prevent them from being born in the first place? To understand these questions, we’ll need to talk about cells – how they go wrong in cancer, and how certain immune cells helped our ancestors survive plagues.</p><p><br></p><h3>Bio</h3><p>Professor Rod Dunbar leads a lab at the School of Biological Sciences that focuses on using human cells to develop new therapies. He’s a medically qualified scientist who spent six years carrying out human immunology research at Oxford University before returning to New Zealand in 2002. Rod is a former director of the Maurice Wilkins Centre and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. In his dissolute youth, he wrote music and scripts for stage and TV, but these days he acts responsibly and professorially. Rod lives with his wife Emma, three teenage kids, two Burmese cats and a mollycoddled Labrador called George.</p>

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