2024 Recipients

Carl H. June, MD, is the Richard W. Vague Professor of 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. Dr. June 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 in Geneva, Switzerland from 1978-1979, 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. Dr. June 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, now called CAR T. The treatment was the first cell or gene therapy to receive FDA approval.  CAR T were first approved to treat children and young adults with refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and as of 2023, CAR T is approved for 6 different kinds of blood cancer. Dr. June has published more than 500 manuscripts and was elected to the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and American Philosophical Society. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including the William B. Coley Award, the Richard V. Smalley, MD Memorial Award from the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer, the AACR-CRI Lloyd J. Old Award in Cancer Immunology, the Philadelphia Award, the Taubman Prize for Excellence in Translational Medical Science (shared with S. Grupp, B. Levine, and D. Porter), the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (shared with J. Allison), the Novartis Prize in Immunology (shared with Z. Eshhar and S. Rosenberg), the Karl Landsteiner Memorial Award, the Debrecen Award for Molecular Medicine, and a lifetime achievement award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the American Association for Cancer Research. Most recently, Dr. June was named a winner of the 2024 Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences.