During a visit to Russia, Jeffrey Gelfand, HMS clinical professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, found doctors using a powerful, potentially explosive laser designed for military applications to treat patients with advanced kidney cancer. Researchers at Mass. General’s Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center then began doing basic animal studies to verify and probe the science. Satoshi Kashiwagi, HMS instructor in medicine and Mark Poznansky, HMS associate professor of medicine, both of MGH, led a team that spent nearly a year trying out different lasers to determine a safe dosage in mice.
