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Honoring and congratulating Dr. Carl June on his receipt of the shared Dan David prize for his work at the University of Pennsylvania where he was a lead researcher in the development of the first personalized cellular therapy for cancer.
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WHEREAS, Dr. Carl June is the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. 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; and
WHEREAS, Dr. June and his colleagues, Dr. Zelig Eshhar and Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg, who pioneered the technology of chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy were announced winners of a one million dollar prize from the Dan David Foundation at Tel Aviv University; and
WHEREAS, Doctors June, Eshhhar, and Rosenberg won in the “future” category of the prize, acknowledging the great contributions their work has made to the future of humanity. The doctors are in excellent company; this year’s “present” category award winner is Dr. Anthony Fauci; and
WHEREAS, Dr. June led the groundbreaking work at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia that culminated in the FDA approval in August 2017 of Kymriah, the first personalized cellular therapy for cancer. It treats adult and pediatric blood cancers such as leukemia; and
WHEREAS, Dr. Rosenberg, chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Research, took the field of engineering cells for cancer treatment even further by identifying an elite subset of immune cells with the potential to destroy solid tumor cancers. Dr. Rosenberg’s technology is licensed by Iovance Biotheraputics and is being developed into a clinical treatment at its new facility at the Navy Yard in South Philadelphia. Dr. Eshhar, an immunologist at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, was the first to engineer the T cells of cancer patients to destroy cancer cells, a truly groundbreaking development in cancer research; and
WHEREAS, Like two other researchers at UPenn who developed the technology for Covid-19 vaccines, Dr. June never gave up on a novel idea’s promise despite the many obstacles to capturing the real function of his research. Dr. June’s lab, working off of Dr. Eshhar’s research, discovered the essential second genetic signal called 4-1BB that enabled the engineered T cells to effectively attack cancer; and
WHEREAS, Dr. June is a graduate of the Naval Academy and the Baylor College School of Medicine. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology. In addition to running his research lab, Dr. June 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 shared Taubman Prize for Excellence in Translational Medical Science in 2014, the shared Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, the shared Novartis Prize in Immunology, the Karl Landsteiner Memorial award, the Debrecen Award and a lifetime achievement award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society; and
WHEREAS, Philadelphians should be proud to live in a City on the cutting edge of cancer research. Dr. June’s work will save countless lives as more therapeutics are developed from his research; now, therefore, be it
RESOLVED, that the City Council of Philadelphia, Hereby honors and congratulates Dr. Carl June on his receipt of the shared Dan David prize for his work at the University of Pennsylvania where he was a lead researcher in the development of the first personalized cellular therapy for cancer.
FURTHER RESOLVED, That an Engrossed copy of this resolution be presented to Dr. June as evidence of the sincere respect and admiration of this legislative body.
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