Did You Know Lady Gaga, 35, and Her Boyfriend Michael Polansky, 38, Are Cancer Research Advocates? Here’s How This Power Couple Has Impacted the Cancer Community

Gaga, 35, started dating Polansky, 38, after ending an engagement to talent agent Christian Carino in 2019.  The couple went "Instagram official" in February 2020 when Gaga shared a photo of the two embracing on a boat. Most recently, People reported that “they almost act like a married couple already” even though there’s no ring on her finger. But who has time for a wedding when you’re an international superstar and a philanthropic businessman?

Most recently, Gaga’s celebrating her new movie (and garnering Oscar buzz!) while Polansky is working as the co-founder and executive director of the Parker Foundation which works to solve problems mainly in the realms of technology, media, company building and public policy. And in a more recent development, he’s turned his focus to the world of cancer as the co-founder and board member for the foundation’s initiative, The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

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And while the two seem to be happy and supporting each other through their collective achievements, it’s also touching to see that they both continue to make a difference in the world of cancer. Gaga, for example, vowed to be a “voice for cancer patients so the world can continue to improve the dialogue and the fight” after losing Sonja Durham, her dear friend and longtime managing director her cosmetic line, to a long battle with stage 4 cancer in her breast, brain and lung in 2017. Gaga was shooting A Star Is Born when she heard that Durham's prognosis was not good. She immediately rushed to the hospital to be with her, but was devastated to discover that Durham had passed just 15 minutes before she arrived.

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"We were supposed to shoot in, like, 30 minutes, and I left the set because her husband called me and I could hear her in the background and I just got in the car and drove," Gaga told Entertainment Weekly. "I missed her by 15 minutes, and she died. I literally laid with her, with her husband, and their dog, and his son."

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Polansky, on the other hand, has had a hand in making strides for the cancer community  by co-founding the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy which serves as “an unprecedented collaboration of the world’s leading cancer centers, all working together to cure cancer once and for all.” The goal of the organization is to help advancements in immunotherapy research reach patients as fast as possible.

Understanding Immunotherapy

What exactly is immunotherapy? Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that harnesses the power of the immune system to fight against cancer in the body. This therapy works by:

• Stimulating, or boosting, the natural defenses of your immune system so it works harder or smarter to find and attack cancer cells
• Or making substances in a lab that are just like immune system components and using them to help restore or improve how your immune system works to find and attack cancer cells

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“Up until now, there's been three pillars of cancer therapy surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy,” Dr. Jim Allison, the chair of the Department of Immunology and executive director of the immunotherapy platform at MD Anderson Cancer Center, told SurvivorNet in an earlier interview. “Immunotherapy is rather unique in that for the first time, we're getting truly curative therapies in many kinds of disease not just in melanoma but in lung cancer, kidney cancer, bladder cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, Merkel cell cancer, head and neck cancer.” Dr. Allison is the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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Dr. Allison said it works in many different kinds of cancers, but there’s still more work to be done.

“Some [cancers] it doesn't work in, it doesn't work yet in,” he said. “That's a big challenge that we're beginning to work on. But there's never been a class of drugs that's worked with quite this at this level and then also offered the possibility for combinations. I think that the most powerful combinations coming up are based on combining immune blockers or enhancers but also drugs that can directly kill tumor cells to really have a double whammy.

“And they can be used perhaps even more safely than what we're doing now and get better responses,” he said. “We now know it works.”

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