Carl H. June

Carl H. June (Denver, United States, 1953) graduated with a BS in Biology from the United States Naval Academy in 1975, and received his medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in 1979. He specialized in Internal Medicine at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda (1980-1983) and in Oncology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center-University of Washington (1983-1985). He then returned to Bethesda, where he founded the Immune Cell Biology Program at the Naval Medical Research Center and headed the Department of Immunology from 1990 to 1995. During this time, he was also a Professor of Medicine and of Cell and Molecular Biology at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (1995-1999). In 1999, he joined the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy, Director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies, and Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. Author of over 350 publications, among his many distinctions he is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Carl June was researching potential treatments for AIDS patients at the University of Pennsylvania when he achieved an important milestone in the clinical development of CAR-T cells. He had developed an interest in immunology while studying medicine in the 1970s, spurred by the fact that his own mother had an autoimmune condition, common among members of her family. After the advances made by Sadelain on the experimental plane, it was time to establish whether cell therapy could also work in human patients, with some researchers concerned that their immune systems would attack and kill the CAR-T cells. In the mid 1990s, June showed that T cells modified to stave off infection with HIV could not only survive in the human body, but could do so long enough to trigger immune responses. This quality of persistence, critical for attacking cancer over time, opened the door to the first clinical trials with CAR-T cells in leukemia patients.

Around that time, June’s first wife fell ill with ovarian cancer aged just 41 and sadly died seven years later. Getting the new therapeutic strategy into trials in human oncological patients accordingly became “the number one thing” in the researcher’s life. It was finally in 2010 that the first two patients, with very late stage leukemia, signed up for what was then a highly experimental trial of June’s own design, with each receiving an infusion of CAR-T cells. This would be the first application in a clinical setting of the findings developed in Sadelain’s lab and tried with success in animal models.

June recalls his amazement at seeing that the treatment achieved better results in humans than it did in experiments run on rodents: “We cured a lot of mice, but the major surprise was that the therapy worked even better in humans. Remarkably, our first patient was cured with a single infusion and for ten years still had CAR-T cells in his body, although he later died of COVID-19. The second patient is still alive and continues to have CAR-T cells in his body. We never thought it would work so effectively.”

“June and Sadelain have brought about a paradigm shift in modern medicine with the development of CAR-T cell immunotherapy. Their work has profoundly transformed the fields of oncology and immunology, to the extent that they are considered the fathers of the first ‘living drug’ in medical history. Unlike traditional drugs, which are metabolized over time and require repeat doses, CAR-T cells comprise the patient’s own cells, which, after being genetically modified to selectively recognize and destroy tumor cells, can persist and function in the body for years, such that a single dose can provide lasting protection. Genetic engineering provides a level of precision that chemotherapy cannot achieve. While the latter acts in a non-selective manner, CAR-T cells attack only the target cells and leave healthy tissue untouched,” explains Antonio Pérez-Martínez, Head of the Pediatric Hemato-Oncology Department at Hospital Universitario La Paz and another nominator of the winning entry.