Fireside Chat: The Future of CAR-T, Cell Therapy, T-Cell Engagers and Synthetic Immunity

Daniel S Chen, MD, PhD, is the founder of Engenuity Life Sciences, former Vice President, Global Head of Cancer Immunotherapy Development at Genentech/Roche and former Chief Medical Officer for IGM Biosciences. He received a BS degree in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1990), a PhD in Microbiology & Immunology (1996) and MD (1998) from the University of Southern California. His PhD work and publications focused on “Early Events in Coronavirus Infection.” Dr Chen completed an Internal Medicine Residency and Medical Oncology Fellowship at Stanford University (2003). He went on to complete a Post-doctoral fellowship with Mark Davis in Immunology, where he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Associate. He also ran the metastatic melanoma clinic at the Stanford Cancer Center from 2003-2006. In that time, he studied human anti-cancer immune responses pre- and post- cancer vaccination and cytokine administration to determine why anti-tumor immune responses were not more clinically effective. He received a U19 grant to develop better immunologic tools to interrogate human immune responses and ultimately patented the MHC cellular microarray to detect and functionally characterize antigen-specific T cell states. He continued as Adjunct Clinical Faculty at Stanford from 2006-2016, where he cared for melanoma patients. At Genentech from 2006-2018, Dr Chen focused on the clinical development of anti-angiogenic and immune modulatory targeted therapies in both early and late Development, as well as the diagnostic tools to aid their development. This included leading the clinical development for atezolizumab, a PD-L1 inhibitor, from the time the program was in research through IND, Phase I, Phase II, Phase III, to filing and approvals in multiple indications worldwide. At IGM Biosciences, Dr Chen focused on the development of novel engineered multivalent and multispecific therapeutics and helped lead this from preclinical to having multiple therapeutics in the clinic in Phase I/II. He is a reviewer for Nature, Immunity, Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer and Clinical Cancer Research, served on the Board of Directors for SITC, has been a recurring session organizer and session chair for PEGS Europe on engineered therapeutics since 2019, gave the keynote presentation at the AACR NCI EORTC Annual Meeting 2014 and presented at the US Congressional Briefing on Immuno Oncology in 2017. He has continued to publish with academic and industry collaborators in the field of cancer immunotherapy, including the often-referenced Chen and Mellman manuscripts, “Oncology meets Immunology: the Cancer-Immunity Cycle,” “Elements of cancer immunity and the cancer-immune set point” and the Hegde and Chen manuscript “Top 10 Challenges in Cancer Immunotherapy.”

Carl June, MD, 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 and director of Translational Research in the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and is an investigator of the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute. He is a graduate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, 1979. He had graduate training in immunology and malaria with Dr. Paul-Henri Lambert at the World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland in 1978 and 1979, and post-doctoral training in transplantation biology with E. Donnell Thomas and John Hansen at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle from 1983 to 1986. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology.He maintains a research laboratory that studies various mechanisms of lymphocyte activation that relate to immune tolerance and adoptive immunotherapy for cancer and chronic infection. In 2011, his research team published findings, which represented the first successful and sustained demonstration of the use of gene transfer therapy to treat cancer. Clinical trials utilizing this approach, in which patients are treated with genetically engineered versions of their own T-cells, are now underway for adults with chronic lymphocytic leukemia and adults and children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Early results in that group show that 90 percent of patients respond to the therapy, and more recently, trials of this approach have begun for patients with other blood cancers and solid tumors including pancreatic cancer, mesothelioma and the brain cancer glioblastoma. In 2014, it became the first personalized cellular therapy for the treatment of cancer therapy to receive the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s prestigious Breakthrough Therapy designation.He has published more than 350 manuscripts and is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including election to the Institute of Medicine in 2012, the William B. Coley award, the Richard V. Smalley Memorial Award from the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer, the AACR-CRI Lloyd J. Old Award in Cancer Immunology, the Hamdan Award for Medical Research Excellence and the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize. In 2014, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.