 At Berkeley, we don't have a hospital or cancer patients. What's unique about what we're doing here is that we're really interested in understanding the basic mechanisms by how the body works. One of the interesting ideas that has emerged at Berkeley is that perhaps we can use what we've learned about how the immune system fights infections to help us better fight other diseases like cancer. One of the biggest breakthroughs that has happened here at Berkeley is work done by Jim Allison in the 1990s that there are molecules that put the brakes on the immune response and prevent it from functioning. So by removing those brakes, we can unleash the immune system to attack cancer. My lab is mainly interested in the problem of infectious disease. One of the things that we discovered is that it might also be possible to, instead of taking the brakes off, actually push on the accelerator. There are special molecules called cyclic dinucleotides, made naturally by bacteria that can supercharge the immune response. Other researchers and companies locally at Berkeley are taking these molecules and trying to apply them for the treatment of cancer. These molecules can be isolated and injected directly into tumors. They cause the tumors to melt away. Conversely, these molecules may also be useful for treating other kinds of diseases. Two billion people worldwide are infected with tuberculosis, and 1.5 million people die every year from this disease. We've taken some of these molecules that were really developed for cancer and have applied them to tuberculosis infection and have found that they're pretty good at eliciting immune responses that can be protective against tuberculosis infection. People have actually been doing research on tuberculosis since the 1800s. For 100 years, we really made very little progress. But now we're in a time where with these new sort of techniques for manipulating the immune response that have come out of other fields, it's really exciting to be able to apply these technologies in TB, and I think that they're really gonna enable us to make huge progress. What was really exciting for us is in the very first experiment we did, we saw that they were as effective as anything else that has been developed to date. When we began our studies, we had no thoughts at all about trying to treat cancer, and it's really been just one of those accidental discoveries that has been really exciting to be part of. My primary motivator is just the excitement of discovery and figuring out how things work. When you work on a disease like tuberculosis, you always have to also think about what do we need to learn in order to eliminate tuberculosis from the planet? Really, this has been one of the major breakthroughs in cancer therapy in the last decade. And it all started here at Berkeley.