Hosted by Cardiff University's School of Medicine

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy stands as a transformative advancement in immunotherapy, achieving significant triumphs against hematological malignancies and, increasingly, autoimmune disorders. After a decade of relatively modest results for solid tumors, recent clinical trials and patient reports have also started to yield promising outcomes in glioblastoma and other challenging solid tumors. Here I will explore the reasons behind these latest achievements and discusses how these advances can be sustained and expanded through different strategies involving CAR engineering approaches and synthetic biology.

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Bio: Carl June is the Richard W. Vague Professor in 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. TIME named Prof. June, to the 2018 TIME 100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. He has been also named a winner of the 2024 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the world’s largest science awards, with $3 million awarded.

Prof. June has led groundbreaking work in engineering chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells for the treatment of refractory and relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia. This technology, which involves the genetic re-engineering of a patient ‘s own T cells to combat his or her disease, represents the first gene transfer therapy technique that has demonstrated sustained success in patients.

He was the first to utilize leukapheresis and subsequent genetic reengineering of isolated T cells to specifically recognize antigens overexpressed in B cell malignancies such as the B cell antigen CD19 (cluster of differentiation 19). He in turn named these modified T cells CART-19 cells on account of their specificity for identifying and targeting CD19-expressing B cells for T-cell mediated cell death. Response rates for patients receiving such CAR T-cell therapy have approached 90% for both adult and pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia and nearly 50% for chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients.

His ongoing research continues to be centered on further understanding lymphocyte activation mechanisms and T cell signaling in an effort to design novel immunotherapy-based treatments for viral infections as well as cancer.

Professor Irizarry also develops open source software implementing his statistical methodology. His software tools are widely used and he is one of the leaders and founders of the Bioconductor Project, an open source and open development software project for the analysis of genomic data. Prof. Irizarry is the developer and instructor for the online Data Analysis for Life Sciences course on the Harvard University edX platform; this course enrolls over 30,000 students per year.

He was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award in Bioinformatics for his promotion of free and open-access materials and methods in the life sciences in 2017. He was also elected as a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2020.