Carl June
University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine
Carl June is the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in the Departments of Medicine and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. He is the director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the Perelman School of Medicine, and the Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania. June graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and earned his M.D. from the Baylor College of Medicine. He spent his fourth year of medical school at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, studying immunology and malaria. June conducted postdoctoral research in transplantation biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle from 1983 to 1986. June served as president of the Clinical Immunology Society and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine. He is a co-founder of Tmunity Therapeutics, Dispatch Biotherapeutics, Capstan Therapeutics, and BlueWhale Bio. CTL019, the CAR T-cell therapy developed in the June laboratory, was the first gene therapy to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Bruce Levine
University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine
Bruce Levine is the Barbara and Edward Netter Professor in Cancer Gene Therapy and the Founding Director of the Clinical Cell and Vaccine Production Facility in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the Abramson Cancer Center at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Levine is a pioneer in the field of CAR T-cell therapies, including the first-in-human adoptive immunotherapy trials to use a lentiviral vector; the first infusions of gene-edited cells, and the first use of lentivirally modified cells to treat cancer. Levine is co-inventor of the first Food and Drug Administration-approved CAR T-cell therapy for leukemia and lymphoma (Kymriah, licensed to Novartis). Levine is co-inventor on 33 patents and co-author of more than 200 manuscripts and book chapters with a Google Scholar citation h-index of 114. He is a co-founder of Tmunity Therapeutics and Capstan Therapeutics. Levine is a recipient of the William Osler Patient Oriented Research Award, the Wallace H. Coulter Award for Healthcare Innovation, the 2020 National Marrow Donor Program/Be The Match Dennis Confer Innovate Award, the 2023 American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy Jerry Mendell Award for Translational Science, and the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy Career Achievement Award in Cell and Gene Therapy.
Isabelle Rivière
Takeda
Isabelle Rivière is Vice President, Cell Therapy Sciences at Takeda. She has developed multiple strategies utilizing various immune cell types, hematopoietic stem cells and pluripotent stem cells for the treatment of cancer, autoimmune diseases, and genetic blood disorders. After conducting her graduate studies at the Institut Curie and Whitehead Institute and her postdoctoral training at New York University, she joined the faculty of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 1999. There she focused on developing genetic approaches and manufacturing processes to enhance various cell types including T lymphocytes and stem cells for the treatment of cancer and genetic blood disorders. She oversaw the production of over 500 CAR T-cell drug products for infusion to cancer patients and obtained Food and Drug Administration Breakthrough Therapy and Orphan Drug designation for the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia with CAR T-cells targeting CD19 in 2014. She has served on the board of directors of the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies, and the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT). She is Scientific Co-founder of Juno Therapeutics Inc. and received the 2023 ASGCT Jerry Mendell Award for Translational Science.
Michel Sadelain
Columbia University
Michel Sadelain is Director of the Columbia Initiative in Cell Engineering and Therapy and Director of the Cancer Cell Therapy Initiative in the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University. He is a pioneer of CAR T-cell therapy. He led the development of CAR T-cells targeting CD19—unique markers found on the surface of blood cancer cells—and established genetic engineering and cell manufacturing capabilities to translate this research. In 2007, this groundwork enabled Sadelain and his team to start treating patients with refractory leukemias. In 2017, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first CAR T-cell therapies—the first genetically engineered cell therapy of any kind—for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia and certain lymphomas. Sadelain completed his M.D. at the University of Paris, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Alberta, and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Sadelain has been elected to the American Association for Cancer Research, American Society for Clinical Investigation, American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine of France. Sadelain has won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, Canada Gairdner International Award, Warren Alpert Foundation Prize, American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy Outstanding Achievement Award, Léopold Griffuel Award, International Prize from Inserm, Jacob and Louise Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine, Passano Laureate, Pasteur-Weizmann/Servier International Prize, William B. Coley Award, and more.