Title
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.
Body
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 f...
Click here for full text