S1 E 05 CANCER IMMUNOTHERAPY
CANCER IMMUNOTHERAPY
Dr. Kent and Dr. Rachel Brady Speak About how Cancer Immunotherapy Works and Where it’s Headed.
TRANSCRIPT:
Dr. Brady: We are looking at the gaps of where we still need to do better, and
immunotherapy can help kind of fill in some of those gaps for some patients. and
that’s life-changing for the patients that it does help. And for the other patients,
we have to keep working.
Dr. Kent: Hello, and welcome to today’s episode of The Vetrospective, where we
dive into all aspects of health and wellness for dogs, cats, and other companion
animals. This is your host, Dr. Michael Kent.
Immunotherapy has emerged as a whole new type of cancer treatment.
Traditionally, we’ve used surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy to treat
cancer. More recently, we’ve added targeted therapies. These are drugs that
target pathways that turn on, really and get stuck and drive a cancer cell to
reproduce. In both human and veterinary oncology, we now have the emergence
of immunotherapy. Some early work was done in the late 19th century with
something called Cooley’s toxins, but these were not consistently doing and can
cause a lot of toxicity. So this was before we even had an understanding of how
the immune system works. Now, as we are really beginning to understand the
cells of the immune system and how they interact with cancer, there are new
treatments and even preventatives emerging. So today I have asked Dr. Rachel
Brady to join us to talk about immunotherapy for cancer treatment.
So Dr. Brady has an undergraduate degree in philosophy and then went on to do
her veterinary degree here at UC Davis. She did her rotating small animal
internship at North Carolina State and then her residency in oncology back here
at UC Davis. So I’ve known her for a while. After finishing her residency, she then
left and went to Colorado State to do her PhD in cancer biology, where she
studied macrophages. We’ll talk a little bit more about that later. I’m glad to say
that Dr. Brady is now my colleague again. She was hired on at UC Davis as an
assistant professor in oncology. So welcome, Dr. Brady. It’s a pleasure to have
you here today.
Dr. Brady: Hi, thank you so much for having me. I’m really happy to be here
today.
Dr. Kent: And thank you for agreeing to do this. So I always like to ask people
this, what got you interested in veterinary medicine and why specifically cancer?
Why oncology?
Dr. Brady: When I was a little girl, my grandmother gave me all of the James
Herriot books. I don’t know how many of our listeners will know those books, but
they were a series of mostly true books written by a veterinarian under a pen
name. And I just thought they were the coolest thing ever. He got to travel
around, meet all different animals, help all different animals, but also really
helped people as well.
Dr. Kent: All Creatures Great and Small. I read those too.
Dr. Brady: So that, I really feel like I credit that with putting me on the path
towards veterinary medicine.
Dr. Kent: So you knew from a really young age?
Dr. Brady: I did. I took a bit of a winding path, but I ended up here, yes.
Dr. Kent: And why cancer?
Dr. Brady: I didn’t know I was interested in cancer until my last year of veterinary
school, which is kind of called your clinical year, where you’re actually in the
hospital learning how to treat patients. And I realized how impactful the cancer
cases are. Not only to the animal, but almost any person you meet has a story of
having cancer or knowing someone with cancer, And that really kind of got me
interested in how much work there is to do in that field and how much potential
there is to help.
Dr. Kent: That’s cool. Mine’s a little similar. We’ll talk about that maybe some
other day. So maybe to start out, cancer is a very, you know, big term. Can you
try to define for me or tell me, what is cancer.
Dr. Brady: Yeah, I’m glad you asked that because I think to understand how
immunotherapy works, it is important to understand how cancer evolves in the
body. And so if you think of a normal adult human or adult dog, we have trillions
of cells in our bodies. And each cell has DNA in it, which you can just think of as
a recipe, but it has billions of letters making up this recipe.
Dr. Kent: It’s a complex recipe.
Dr. Brady: It is. So if you think of that, we have trillions of cells with billions of
letters inside of them. And every time a cell needs to duplicate or make another
cell of itself, it has to copy all of those letters perfectly. And so I bring that up to
say, over a lifetime, there’s going to be mistakes made.
Dr. Kent: It’s like typing, right? If you’re typing and you’re just typing words from
another paper, you should see my autocorrect, right? It’s not good.
Dr. Brady: And so even though our body has evolved ways to correct those
mistakes or avoid those mistakes, it’s inevitable that mistakes will happen. And
when enough of those mistakes accumulate at a certain point, that we call that
cell cancerous.
Dr. Kent: Okay, and then that cell divides and that leads down the road to having
a mass we can find and then, and the like so.
Dr. Brady: Right.
Dr. Kent: What I was also saying now as we go here, kind of the big question.
So why doesn’t the immune system just kill this cancer cell like we would any
virus, bacteria, or other infection that we’re faced with every day, we have
thousands of bacteria or viruses around us.
Dr. Brady: Right. And that is the big question that everyone’s trying to figure out.
Dr. Kent: That’s why I asked you.
Dr. Brady: But so I think to understand that, we need to understand how our
immune system works. Our immune system is made-up of cells we call white
blood cells, and their job is to keep our body in homeostasis.
Dr. Kent: Okay, homeostasis, what do you mean?
Dr. Brady: A state of balance.
Dr. Kent: Okay.
Dr. Brady: We can’t have too much of any one thing. So when anything disturbs
that balance, as you mentioned, an injury, an infection, with a bacteria or a virus,
it’s those white blood cells that identify that and respond to it. I like this metaphor
that I’ve been told, I did not come up with this myself. You can think of all these
white blood cells as having satellites on them. We call them receptors, but they’re
basically the same thing as a satellite sticking out from the cell. And they’re
constantly patrolling the body for anything that disturbs this balance. And when
they sense something, they start sending signals, just like a satellite sends
signals down a big cable. They send big signals inside the cell, which then tells
other cells that something is going on. And these cells need to react to fix the
problem.
Dr. Kent: Okay, yeah. So we’re trying to fix this problem here. And so why don’t
they with cancer cells?
Dr. Brady: So what happens with cancer is two different things. First is, as we
already mentioned, these cancer cells are actually our own cells that have small
mistakes in them. And for some cancer cells, our immune cells just literally
cannot recognize that they are something that’s disturbing the balance because
they’re not so foreign as a virus or a bacteria that’s invaded your body.
Dr. Kent: So it’s your cell that’s changed. So, the immune system says, oh,
That’s your cell, so it doesn’t attack it.
Dr. Brady: Right.
Dr. Kent: Yeah.
Dr. Brady: The other main thing that happens is that unfortunately, the cancer
cells can be very smart, that they have evolved ways to basically build a brick
wall around this mass or this tumor that’s growing and basically hide it from the
immune system. So even if our immune cells could try to recognize them, they’re
often blocked from doing that because the cancer has outsmarted them.
Dr. Kent: So there’s this concept of immune editing. I’m wondering if you could
explain it better for me and for everyone who’s listening.
Dr. Brady: Right, so immunoediting is broadly the process by which these
cancer cells escape our immune system. So as I said, all of these white blood
cells are constantly on alert for anything abnormal in the body. So there’s an
early phase when cells with these mistakes, maybe we’d call them pre-cancerous
or a very early cancerous cell, that our immune system is recognizing them and
eliminating them. And that’s happening in all of us all the time.
Dr. Kent: Every day.
Dr. Brady: Every day. There’s a second phase where it becomes more in
equilibrium. Maybe a small tumor has grown, but the immune system is still able
to keep it in check. So the immune system and the cancer cells are in an
equilibrium state then where not one of them is winning?
Dr. Kent: Kind of like a chronic infection in a way.
Dr. Brady: Exactly. And at that point, usually none of us know that a tumor is
there. That’s usually before we’re able to detect it on most of our tests. And then
the third step is unfortunately what we call immune escape, where the cancer
cells have evolved enough of these mechanisms to outsmart the immune cells
and build up that brick wall. and it kind of tips that balance over into letting the
tumor grow, what we call in an uncontrollable fashion. And that’s really the
hallmark of cancer by definition, that it has escaped the ability of our immune
system to control it.
Dr. Kent: So this is almost Darwinian in the evil kind of way that basically it’s
survival of the fittest cancer cell.
Dr. Brady: Exactly.
Dr. Kent: Yeah, that’s very cool. So when we’re talking about these walls and
like, are we looking at basically immunosuppression.
Dr. Brady: Yes.
Dr. Kent: And are we looking at it in the tumor or your whole body? Are you
immunosuppressed?
Dr. Brady: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, once a tumor has grown to that
stage where it’s escaped our immune system and this is the time that we can
start picking it up or it might start causing symptoms, it has developed its own
environment, like its own little ecosystem. And in that ecosystem, it is there’s a
ton of immunosuppression. So it is keeping out the white blood cells that we
would want to be in there to kill off the abnormal cells and which we can talk
more about later, it is recruiting our body’s own immune cells to actually help it to
grow. So it’s almost flipped these cells that are supposed to be helping us to the
bad side.
Dr. Kent: And I always also like to just think of it in terms of… so we almost need
autoimmune disease to kill those tumors. So they’re using that side, that balance
of the immune system that’s keeping us from attacking our own body, but
amplifying it?
Dr. Brady: Yeah, exactly. And you can almost think of autoimmune diseases as
the flip side, where we mentioned before a body needs to be in balance. And
autoimmune disease is where the immune system is way ramped up and
attacking itself. Whereas cancer is, you’re absolutely right, it’s stopped attacking
itself when we would want it to.
Dr. Kent: Yeah. So Can you tell me what are the main types of immunotherapy
that we use to try to treat and maybe just keep in mind how we’re trying to
change that environment? I know this is an area you do research in.
Dr. Brady: Yes, definitely. So, as we’ve learned more about these immune cells
and our immune system in the past couple of decades, we have realized that we
can try to convince the body’s immune cells that it should be fighting these
cancer cells. And there’s two main ways you can do that. One is to try to damage
that brick wall. I’ve mentioned a couple ways. So you can knock it down in
different ways or weaken it.
Dr. Kent: So this brick wall that’s kind of isolating the tumor and keeping it
immunosuppressed.
Dr. Brady: Correct. And a very popular example of doing that is our checkpoint
inhibitors, which some people may be familiar with. But all that a checkpoint
inhibitor does is stops the cancer from being able to build up that brick wall. It’s
removing its ability to do that so then our immune cells can flood in and start
killing those cancer cells.
Dr. Kent: So this is kind of like inhibiting the immunosuppression?
Dr. Brady: Exactly.
Dr. Kent: Okay, taking off that brake that’s stuck on, that’s keeping the cancer
basically protected.
Dr. Brady: Yes, it’s inhibiting the inhibitor. And this has been life-changing for
people with melanoma or some types of metastatic lung cancer. It has literally
turned fatal cancers into ones that can be cured or controlled really long-term.
Dr. Kent: So I interrupted you. said there was two types.
Dr. Brady: Yeah, so the other way that people try to approach this is rather than
weakening this metaphorical brick wall is just to overwhelm it. So to really
strengthen our immune response to the point that this brick wall doesn’t even
matter. We’re just, we have so much of an immune response, it can flood in there
anyway. And so some examples of that are things like cancer vaccines, which is
not a vaccine how a lot of people think of it.
Dr. Kent: So do you mean like a preventative vaccine? Or more of a treatment
vaccine?
Dr. Brady: More of a treatment vaccine in this case, where we are trying to help
our immune cells know which cells to attack. So a normal vaccine might tell your
cells, hey, these proteins look like they come from the flu. If you see these flu
proteins in your body, you need to attack them. We can do the same thing, but
with pieces of the cancer.
Dr. Kent: Great. So basically, instead of me going to get my flu vaccine every
fall, you might, would it be your own cancer cells that would use to do this or
more of a generic vaccine like you get at a pharmacy?
Dr. Brady: People have tried both approaches. It is trending more towards
personalizing these vaccines for an individual tumor. Another really popular
strategy that some people might have heard of for this idea of just kind of
strengthening the immune response so much that it overwhelms the
immunosuppression are CAR T-cells. This is one of the earliest immunotherapies
to be incredibly successful. And this is when we…
Dr. Kent: And it’s in people still at this point.
Dr. Brady: This is in people, although there’s several early trials in dogs as well.
Dr. Kent: And can you tell me what is a CAR T-cell? Because that’s, you know,
it’s a little complex, right?
Dr. Brady: To answer that, Just to define a T cell first is we’ve been referring to
the immune system as white blood cells. Very generally, though, those white
blood cells are split into two groups. There’s the initial kind of guards that we call
the innate immune system. And those cells are able to recognize a virus or a
bacteria or maybe those early cancer cells right away and kind of stimulate a fast
response, but it’s a very non-specific response. It can kind of try to wipe out
anything, but it’s not targeted against a specific virus or a specific bacteria.
Dr. Kent: Okay.
Dr. Brady: But then what it does is also signal to the body that we need to mount
up this secondary set of defenders, and this is called the adaptive immune
system.
Dr. Kent: And that’s what we vaccinate with, or that’s the response we’re trying
to get.
Dr. Brady: Exactly. So one of those cells that’s very important is the T-cell. It’s a
white blood cell. That’s main job is to kill cells that shouldn’t be there. So when
we say a CAR T-cell, that fancy word in front, the CAR, it’s an acronym. just for
chimeric antigen receptor, which that’s not important. The important part to know
is that we take a person’s or a dog’s own T-cells out of their body. We modify
them in the laboratory and tell it, hey, you need to be looking out for this
particular type of cancer cell. And then we put them back in the body in huge
numbers, hoping that they will attack the cancer cells.
Dr. Kent: So basically you just reprogram them so that they find the target that
you wanted to, in this case, the cancer.
Dr. Brady: Exactly. And CAR T-cells have been life-changing for people with
different lymphomas and leukemias. And those are cancers that we call kind of
blood-borne, that are mostly found in your blood. And they have changed certain
types of lymphomas from, again, fatal into being able to be cured.
Dr. Kent: So you’ve been talking about some of these as advances in humans.
And I know we’re a bit behind, but can you explain to me or tell me a little bit
about how similar our immune systems are between, let’s say, a dog or cat and a
person? And can we just use an immunotherapy made for people? So can I take
one of the treatments and put it right into a dog or a cat?
Dr. Brady: Yes, great question. Because obviously I’m a veterinarian and my
passion is helping animals.
Dr. Kent: Mine too.
Dr. Brady: But as I’ve mentioned, I really love the opportunity to also help
people. And that is the really cool thing that dogs and people and cats actually
develop very similar cancers. So it’s not perfect, they’re different species, but a
lot of the tumors that they develop are similar enough that breakthroughs that we
find in a dog can be applied to a human and vice versa.
Dr. Kent: Yeah.
Dr. Brady: It’s not perfect. Immune systems are complex.
Dr. Kent: So are our immune systems similar?
Dr. Brady: More similar than a lot of the animal models that have to be used. So
anytime a new immunotherapy or any drug for that matter is going to be given to
people, it has to be shown to be safe. And that has been historically done in
mice. Mice have very different immune systems from people. So while dogs and
cats are not perfect replicas of the human immune system, they’re a lot closer to
us than mice.
Dr. Kent: I like to think of myself more like a dog than a mouse.
Dr. Brady: Yeah, me too. And it is, it really does go both ways. We can really
help all of those species by collaborating with our colleagues who treat people.
Breakthroughs that they’ve had can help us treat dogs and cats and other
animals better and vice versa. And that is one thing I really love about what we
do.
Dr. Kent: It’s pretty neat. So one of the areas that has been a huge
breakthrough, for example, in lymphoma in people is something called the
monoclonal antibody.
Dr. Brady: Yes.
Dr. Kent: I was hoping you could kind of maybe break that down for me, explain
what it is, and then kind of, you know, we’ll go from there.
Dr. Brady: Yeah, that is another big area of research in immunotherapy. So
antibodies in general are a protein made by another immune cell in our body.
And they are an important way of also killing off things that shouldn’t be there.
Dr. Kent: So like a bacterial infection or something like that?
Dr. Brady: Exactly. Some of our immune cells will produce massive amounts of
antibodies that in a bunch of different ways can kill off those bacteria cells.
Dr. Kent: Bacteria, viruses, et cetera.
Dr. Brady: Exactly.
Dr. Kent: So how are we trying to use them for cancer?
Dr. Brady: So you can, in a lab, make these antibodies that target the proteins
that a cancer cell puts out. So basically everything in our body, everything that
we’re talking about, it revolves around proteins. Proteins are the things that we
can tell these cells to find and locate.
Dr. Kent: There are building blocks, right? Proteins make up everything in us.
Dr. Brady: Exactly.
Dr. Kent: So are there enough differences between a cancer cell with a protein
in a normal cell with a protein, are you just going to make one of these really bad
autoimmune diseases we were just alluding to earlier?
Dr. Brady: Sometimes.
Dr. Kent: Yeah.
Dr. Brady: Not all the time, but some specific types of tumors have enough of
these mistakes that we’ve talked about, that they’re making proteins that are
very, very different from normal proteins in our body.
Dr. Kent: And we can target those. Great.
Dr. Brady: Some tumors, we’re not as lucky and we have to use other
approaches.
Dr. Kent: So can I take, there’s a lot of monoclonals available for people now.
You see them advertised on TV all the time.
Dr. Brady: Yes.
Dr. Kent: And they all end in MAB, right? And they’re using them not only for
cancer, but I’ve seen an ad for eczema and other things as well. So can we just
take those and use them in our patients now? Can I use it in one of my dogs or
cats? I know that’s a loaded question.
Dr. Brady: No, that is a good point because that would be awesome if we could.
But unfortunately, what happens if you take one of these antibodies targeted
towards something in the human body and put it in a dog body, the dog’s immune
system is going to say, whoa, there is something foreign here. It’s going to know
that protein doesn’t belong there and attack it or make other antibodies to attack
it, just like it would any other foreign invader. So what we need to do is make the
proteins, make these antibodies very similar to the natural antibodies a dog’s
body might make or a cat’s body might make. However, it’s still very helpful. We
can still use a lot of the foundational work, but we have to just make it specific to
a dog’s body or a cat’s body.
Dr. Kent: Are some tumors more likely to respond to immunotherapies than
others?
Dr. Brady: Yeah, this is an interesting question. It has become more normal to
talk about some tumors in the immunotherapy world as hot or cold.
Dr. Kent: And what do you mean by hot or cold? What’s a hot tumor?
Dr. Brady: So a hot tumor has a lot of these proteins that are really different and
that we could really attack well. While a cold tumor, you can think of it, we say
cold, but you can think of it as, yeah, this kind of bleak winter landscape just
without a lot of things going on that we can really target with our
immunotherapies.
Dr. Kent: So, give me an example of a hot tumor.
Dr. Brady: In people and in some versions of the dog tumor, melanomas are
what we consider a hot tumor. And that means as they’ve been replicating, as
they’ve been like making new cells, and all these mistakes are accumulating,
they are very, very different from a normal cell. And so it is much easier to target
that with some of these things we’ve been talking about.
Dr. Kent: So that’s why it’s the prototypic, you know, poster child for
immunotherapy in some ways and some of the big advances have been made.
So can you give me an example of a cold tumor that we see in vet med?
Dr. Brady: Yeah, unfortunately in both, children and in dogs, there’s a type of
tumor called osteosarcoma that grows in the bone. And unfortunately, it does
affect younger children. And that tumor is kind of known for being very cold,
where it’s been proven very hard to target with immunotherapies, because
there’s not a lot of things for our immune cells to latch onto on it.
Dr. Kent: So I told everyone earlier that you like to study macrophages. At least
you did your PhD in it. So first, what’s a macrophage? That’s besides something
with a cool name.
Dr. Brady: Yeah, I’ve been waiting for this. I’ve spent the past four years talking
about these cells. So we did briefly mention these two different arms of our
immune system where we have that initial wave, the innate immune system, and
then that second wave that’s a little bit later, the adaptive immune system.
Dr. Kent: That initial assault to try to knock something out.
Dr. Brady: Right. Most of the immunotherapy work so far has been on T-cells,
which are part of that second later wave of our immune system. But more
recently, in the past decade or so, we’ve become interested in these cells that
are part of that innate wave. So innate meaning they’re the first responders,
sometimes within hours of some type of insult, of an injury or an infection. One of
those cells is called a macrophage. A macrophage are these big cells that their
main job is to eat other things in the body.
Dr. Kent: They kind of clean up the mess, right?
Dr. Brady: That’s right. They can clean up viruses, bacteria. They can clean up
our own cells that are dead or diseased. And we can convince them to
sometimes eat up the tumor cells.
Dr. Kent: So how do we do that? Well, that’s the million-dollar question, right?
Dr. Brady: That’s right. So, one thing that cancer does, as we’ve mentioned
before, but really particularly with macrophages, is it convinces macrophages to
support it. So, part of that brick wall I’ve mentioned, that is chock full of
macrophages that are defending the tumor from other immune cells from coming
in. And they are directly kind of helping the tumor grow. So, what we needed to
figure out is how do we convince them to to get back on the good side.
Dr. Kent: We have to reprogram, get them out of the cult.
Dr. Brady: Absolutely. And we call that re-educating or repolarizing them.
There’s many different ways to do that, but the main goal is to remind the
macrophages, hey, you’re actually supposed to be fighting against these cancer
cells instead of defending them. And the cool thing is that the macrophage-based
therapies are not really meant to be used alone. What they’re meant to do is be
used in conjunction with some of these long-standing therapies at work, like
checkpoint inhibitors, and they make each other more effective. So think of this,
you know, this brick wall surrounding the tumor, and you’re weakening it at
certain points with these checkpoint inhibitors. But if you can also then change a
bunch of the macrophages in that brick wall and say, okay, you also attacked the
tumor. You’ve weakened it in more than one way. So really, when you can use
these therapies together, they tend to be synergistic.
Dr. Kent: This is great. Now, I’m going to pretend to be a cynic, which I’m not. I’m
an oncologist, so therefore I’m an optimist. But over my career, I’ve seen cancer
cured many, many times in the headlines. And then we come back to the reality
of what it can do. So, these immunotherapies that are emerging, they’re not all
here yet for us. But where does this fit in? How do we integrate it into our
practice? How do we bring these therapies forward? How do we know if they
work?
Dr. Brady: Right. That’s a good point because obviously I’m passionate about
this and I’m painting this awesome picture, which is really, there is a lot of room
for hope or a lot of reason to hope. But like anything, it’s not perfect. We don’t
have a precise controller of our immune system. So, there’s still side effects to
these therapies and there’s still a lot of patients who maybe respond to them for a
short time and then the tumor starts to grow again or don’t respond at all or have
such bad side effects they can’t continue on with the treatment. And so I know a
lot of people always ask me, you know, why don’t we have a cure for cancer yet?
Dr. Kent: Yeah.
Dr. Brady: And it’s because every single tumor that grows is different. So we’re
not trying to cure cancer. We’re trying to, you know.
Dr. Kent: Cure a million different diseases.
Dr. Brady: Exactly, as they keep popping up. And so what I think is, this is not
going to wipe cancer out, but what we are looking at the gaps of where we still
need to do better. And immunotherapy can help kind of fill in some of those gaps
for some patients. And that’s life-changing for the patients that it does help. And
for the other patients, we have to keep working.
Dr. Kent: And how do we work? How do we figure that out? How do we know if it
works or not?
Dr. Brady: Yeah, so one thing that you and I are both involved in are…
Dr. Kent: Softball question, I know.
Dr. Brady: Clinical trials, which is really important because we want to, in a
scientific way, show that these therapies are safe and then show that they are
effective. So, both in people and in dogs and in cats, we run these very controlled
trials, where we enroll, let’s say dogs with a specific tumor type, give them a
specific treatment and very rigorously kind of follow how they do. And it’s cool
here at UC Davis, some of the people here made our own checkpoint inhibitor
that you were involved with.
Dr. Kent: Yes.
Dr. Brady: And that’s a huge deal for us because that’s been used routinely in
people for decades now, and so we need to really work to catch up to that. And
we’re giving it to dogs now with diseases that are considered very end stage and
would be, these cancers would be killing these dogs within a short period of time.
Dr. Kent: And we’ve had our first dog actually clear its lung tumors, which is
pretty amazing.
Dr. Brady: It is amazing.
Dr. Kent: Yeah, so this is a lot of hope and a lot of promise. I mean, that’s what
we need in oncology, right?
Dr. Brady: Yes, absolutely.
Dr. Kent: So I’m gonna wrap it up here and just wanted to say thank you for
taking the time to speak with me. It’s been a pleasure, Dr. Brady.
Dr. Brady: Oh yeah, thank you for having me. I hope it was useful to everyone
who’s listening.
Dr. Kent: I hope so too. You know, I think immunotherapy is just this black box
right now, and I hope kind of our deep dive into how it works will be helpful in
understanding that.
Dr. Brady: Yes, absolutely.
Dr. Kent: All right, thanks.
Dr. Brady: Thank you.
Dr. Kent: The Vetrospective, as with life, takes a village. I want to thank those
who suggested I start this project and everyone who has encouraged and
supported me along the way. Particularly, I want to thank our producer and
director, Danae Blythe-Unti, Nancy Bei, who is our program coordinator, our
sound mixer, Andy Cowitt, and theme music was composed and produced by
Tim Gahagan. Thank you all, and we’ll see you next time.
