Page 22 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 1 Fall 2013

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and oncology. Eventually, he joined a newly created
program in cancer biology, choosing as his adviser
the chairman of the department of immunology, Dr.
Eckhard Podack.
Schreiber quickly became a star in Podack’s lab. “He’s
been my best student,” Podack says. “He has all the char-
acter, motivations, intelligence, and initiative that a great
scientist needs to have.”
Mainstream cancer therapies such as chemotherapy
and radiation degrade the human immune system while
attacking tumors. Podack and his team were working on
developing new approaches that could harness the immune
system itself to fight cancer.
Working with a group of about 15 scientists in the lab,
Schreiber began to make significant contributions of his
own. In a discovery that Podack describes as “astonish-
ing and unanticipated,” Schreiber isolated an antibody
that reacted with immune regulatory cells, and which
might eventually be able to control them. In time, this
could enable doctors to program the immune system to
tolerate organ transplants, as well as to activate specific
tumor-fighting cells.
In late 2007, biotech entrepreneur Jeff Wolf founded
Heat Biologics to license and commercialize Podack’s
discoveries. Wolf, a Stanford M.B.A. but not a scientist,
needed someone who understood the intricacies of the
research better than he did. Podack suggested his best
student. In the fall of 2008, Schreiber began meeting with
Wolf on Saturdays to tutor him in the science he and
Podack were developing.
Meanwhile, Schreiber’s research career continued to
take off. His dissertation was awarded the Best Ph.D.
Thesis of 2010 by the Miami medical school faculty, and
he was nominated as a “future leader in translational
cancer research” at the annual meeting of the American
Association for Cancer Research.
But Schreiber’s work was about to become very
personal.
His wife Nicki, who was completing her training at
Emory University, got a rare week off from her residency
in early March 2011, and the Schreibers planned a trip
together to Costa Rica. Taylor had mentioned to Nicki
over Skype that he wasn’t feeling well, but it was not
until they were together in Costa Rica that she became
more concerned. Hiking together in the rainforest,
Taylor couldn’t keep up with her.
“I was probably in denial in those three or four weeks,
when I’d been having symptoms and didn’t do anything
about it,” Taylor recalls. Finally, after returning home and
breaking down on the treadmill after running less than
half a mile, Schreiber went to see a family physician who
served many of the medical school students on campus.
Schreiber remembers sitting in the doctor’s office
while a medical student conducted his physical. Taylor
joked aloud that his symptoms were probably nothing.
But he noticed something in the student’s demeanor that
suggested otherwise. “That’s when I started getting a
sense that they knew something I didn’t know,” he recalls.
He soon learned that initial blood tests had revealed an
elevated T-cell count and evidence of inflammation.
These were troubling signs.
Schreiber was sent for a chest x-ray, and reviewed the
results himself. He could see that “things looked a little
larger than normal.” That night, he called his friend Joe
Rosenblatt, head of the cancer center and a member of
his thesis committee. He described his symptoms and
the preliminary tests results. Rosenblatt’s response:
“Smells like Hodgkin’s. Come see me tomorrow morning.”
Two days later, Schreiber was in the operating room at
Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, undergoing a
mediastinoscopy, in which samples of tissue inside the
chest are examined. Nicki, who had flown home from
Atlanta, delivered the news to Taylor as he awoke in the
post-op room; his tissue samples contained cells confirm-
ing the diagnosis of Hodgkin’s. The date was April 1, 2011.
Hodgkin’s lymphoma, also known as Hodgkin’s disease,
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