Gaga's Gallant Beau
- Pop icon Lady Gaga turned 35 over the weekend and her boyfriend, Michael Polansky, sent her a massive bouquet of flowers.
- Polansky is the executive director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.
- Immunotherapy is used for some cancer treatments as a way to harness the power of the immune system to fight against cancer in the body.
Gaga is currently on location in Italy filming House Of Gucci, the new Ridley Scott film. But what many don’t know is that her boyfriend, Michael Polansky, is a big advocate for cancer care.
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Polansky’s Involvement in the Cancer World
Gaga’s former romances have been rather high-profile, but with Polansky, she’s keeping things relatively low-key. Gaga started dating Polansky after breaking off her 2019 engagement to talent agent Christian Carino. Polansky, 37, is a tech investor and entrepreneur. The two went “Instagram official” in February 2020 when Gaga posted a photo of the pair cuddling on a boat and looking quite adorable.
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Polansky is a graduate of Harvard University, and he serves as the executive director of the San Francisco-based Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, which sponsors cancer research. The Parker Institute is a collaboration among 300 of the leading immunologists at six academic cancer centers in the U.S., dedicated to the mission of: “harnessing the power of the immune system to fight and cure cancer.”
Immunotherapy for Ovarian Cancer
Understanding Immunotherapy
Immunotherapy is used for some cancer treatments as a way to harness the power of the immune system to fight against cancer in the body. According to the American Cancer Society (ACS), immunotherapy fights cancer in two primary ways:
- Stimulating, or boosting, the natural defenses of your immune system so it works harder or smarter to find and attack cancer cells
- 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
Related: This Nobel Prize Winner and His Wife Are Saving Lives Together
Dr. Jim Allison, the executive director of the immunotherapy platform at MD Anderson Cancer Center, tells SurvivorNet in an earlier interview, “Well, up until now, there’s been three pillars of cancer therapy– surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. 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.”
“It goes on and on,” says Dr. Allison. “So it works in many different kinds of cancers. Some it doesn’t work in, it doesn’t work yet in. 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 says. “We now know it works.”
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