Charles G. Drake, MD, PhD
Associate Professor, Oncology, Immunology and Urology
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Baltimore, MD USA
Charles Drake received his PhD in Immunology from the National Jewish Center for Immunology and his MD from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. After completing an internal medicine residency on the Osler medicine service at Johns Hopkins, he entered the field of medical oncology. During Dr. Drake's oncology fellowship, he began to investigate the immune response to prostate cancer, developing a unique murine model to perform studies on antigen-specific T-cell tolerance to tumors. Experiments in this model supported the concept that androgen-ablation could mitigate tolerance to prostate cancer, creating a window during which tumor vaccination could prove successful (Cancer Cell 2005).
Currently, Dr. Drake is the co-director of the Multidisciplinary Prostate Cancer Clinic at Hopkins, where the combination of androgen-ablation and vaccination is being examined in a translational, pre-surgical trial. Using additional in vivo models, the Drake laboratory showed that LAG-3 is relatively over-expressed on non-functional T cells, and that LAG-3 blockade affects T-cell function in both Treg-dependent and Treg-independent mechanisms (JCI 2007). More recently, the laboratory was able to show that blocking the immune checkpoints PD-1 and LAG-3 could prove synergistic, in several in vivo cancer models. Ongoing work in the laboratory is focused on understanding the role of LAG-3 in regulatory T-cell induction, as well as the regulation of immune checkpoint molecules and ligands in prostate and kidney cancer.