The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health awarded the second annual Trailblazer Prize for Clinician-Scientists to NCI’s James Kochenderfer.
Kochenderfer received the Trailblazer Prize and a $10,000 honorarium for developing immunotherapies that leverage chimeric antigen receptor T-cells to treat blood cancers. John I. Gallin and Elaine Gallin fund the prize.
The Trailblazer Prize recognizes contributions of early career clinician-scientists whose work has the potential to or has led to innovations in patient care and seeks to raise awareness of the critical role the clinician-scientist plays in biomedical research and clinical care.
Kochenderfer and prize finalists Ami S. Bhatt, of Stanford University, and Evan Macosko, of Broad Institute, and Giovanni Traverso, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, gave presentations at an event on Capitol Hill to inform policymakers about their research and the need to inspire more clinician-scientists to join the field.
The FNIH’s Charles A. Sanders Legacy Fund has awarded all finalists $5,000 for their laboratories.
Kochenderfer is an investigator in the surgery branch at the Center for Cancer Research at NCI. He was the first to design and demonstrate the effectiveness of anti-CD19 CAR T cells in humans, leading to the first FDA approval of a CAR T-cell therapy for lymphoma. He also led the first clinical trials focused on the anti-B-cell maturation antigen CAR for the treatment of multiple myeloma.
Kochenderfer has open trials investigating novel CAR T-cell therapies for diseases and is developing new methods to improve the cancer fighting ability of CAR T cells.
