Engineering T cells: moving beyond leukemia

Engineering T cells: moving beyond leukemia
Air date: Wednesday, September 28, 2016, 3:00:00 PM
Category: WALS - Wednesday Afternoon Lectures
Runtime: 00:49:33
Description: NIH Director’s Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series
It is now well established that the immune system can control and eliminate cancer cells. Adoptive T-cell transfer has the potential to overcome the significant limitations associated with vaccine-based strategies in patients who are often immune compromised. Dr. June will discuss how the emerging discipline of synthetic biology-which combines elements of genetic engineering and molecular biology to create new biological structures with enhanced functionalities-can be applied to cancer. He will also talk about the outlook for chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) and T-cell receptor (TCR) T-cell therapies, including managing toxicities and expanding the availability of personalized cell therapy as a promising approach to all hematologic malignancies and solid tumors. Many questions remain in the field of CAR T cells, but the encouraging response rates pave a wide road for future investigation.
Carl June is the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. He is currently Director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the Perelman School of Medicine, and Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, 1979. He had graduate training in Immunology and malaria with Dr. Paul-Henri Lambert at the World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland from 1978-79, and post-doctoral training in transplantation biology with E. Donnell Thomas and John Hansen at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle from 1983 - 1986. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology. He maintains a research laboratory that studies various mechanisms of lymphocyte activation that relate to immune tolerance and adoptive immunotherapy for cancer and chronic infection. In 2011, his research team published findings detailing a new therapy in which patients with refractory and relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia were treated with genetically engineered versions of their own T cells. The treatment has also now also been used with promising results to treat children with refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He has published more than 350 manuscripts and is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including election to the Institute of Medicine in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014, the William B Coley award, the Richard V Smalley Memorial Award from the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer, the AACR-CRI Lloyd J. Old Award in Cancer Immunology, the Philadelphia Award in 2012, the Taubman Prize for Excellence in Translational Medical Science in 2014 (shared with S. Grupp, B. Levine, D. Porter), the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (shared w J. Allison), the Novartis Prize in Immunology (shared with Z. Eshaar and S. Rosenberg), the Karl Landsteiner Memorial award, the Debrecen Award and a lifetime achievement award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
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Author: Carl June, M.D., Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy and Director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the Perelman School of Medicine; Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania
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