The Cancer Research Institute has presented awards to seven scientists:
2019 William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor Immunology
Antoni Ribas, of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Elizabeth M. Jaffee, of Johns Hopkins, shared the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor Immunology.
Ribas is a professor of medicine, surgery, and molecular and medical pharmacology at UCLA and director of the Tumor Immunology Program at Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.
He received the award in recognition of his efforts to spearhead the clinical adoption of checkpoint immunotherapy, his complementary research that has defined mechanisms and identified biomarkers of response and acquired resistance to PD-1 blockade therapies, and his development of stem cell-based adoptive cell therapies.
Jaffee is a deputy director, Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, associate director, Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Johns Hopkins University.
She received the award for research focused on novel vaccine approaches that overcome immune tolerance to cancers and her development of both genomic and proteomic methods to identify new pathways and biomarkers associated with the initiation and progression of pancreatic cancers.
2019 William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic Immunology
The Coley award for basic immunology went to four researchers for their collective contributions to identifying and elucidating the role of the T cell antigen receptor zeta chain as a key T cell signaling molecule and its application to CAR T-cell therapy. They are:
Zelig Eshhar, professor of chemical and cellular immunology, Weizmann Institute of Science; Lawrence E. Samelson, chief of the NCI Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Biology, Center for Cancer Research; Brian Seed, professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School and investigator, Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital; and Arthur Weiss, investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and Engleman Distinguished Professor, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco.
2019 Frederick W. Alt Award for New Discoveries in Immunology
The Frederick W. Alt Award went to Shane Crotty, professor at the Division of Vaccine Discovery, La Jolla Institute for Immunology, in recognition of his body of scientific research contributing to our understanding of the underlying immunology of vaccines, particularly the development of potent antibody responses and immune memory, and his elucidation of the important role of CD4+ “helper” T cells in these processes.
