Carl June

Carl H. June, born in 1953, is a distinguished American immunologist and oncologist renowned for pioneering chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, a groundbreaking approach that reprograms patients' own immune cells to combat cancer. 

Dr. June graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1975 and earned his medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in 1979. He completed his medical training in internal medicine and oncology at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and pursued postdoctoral research in transplantation biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

In 1999, Dr. June joined the University of Pennsylvania, where he currently serves as the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. He is also the director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Penn Medicine's Abramson Cancer Center. 

Dr. June's research focuses on understanding lymphocyte activation mechanisms related to immune tolerance and developing adoptive immunotherapies for cancer and chronic infections. His work has led to the development of CAR T-cell therapy, which has been transformative in treating certain leukemias and lymphomas. 

Throughout his career, Dr. June has received numerous accolades, including the William B. Coley Award, the Richard V. Smalley Memorial Award from the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer, and the AACR-CRI Lloyd J. Old Award in Cancer Immunology. In 2024, he was honored with the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his development of CAR T-cell immunotherapy.

Dr. June's contributions have significantly advanced the field of immunotherapy, offering new hope to patients with previously untreatable cancers.