ABOUT DR. CARL JUNE
Carl June is Director of Translational Research at the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, an Investigator of the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute and Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Penn.
Under Dr. June’s leadership, the Translational Research team at Penn has accelerated research advances in the development of therapies that use the immune system to fight cancer. Through innovative clinical trials, the team is assessing the effectiveness of therapies that enhance the immune system's ability to recognize and disable or eliminate tumor cells.
- Abramson immunologists and gynecologic oncologists are developing immune-based therapies for recurrent ovarian cancer. These include the use of white blood cells called dendritic cells in vaccines to help the patient’s own immune system identify and fight tumors. This work is being supported by the Immune Therapy Initiative for Ovarian Cancer.
- Another new development being supported by the Immune Therapy Initiative for Ovarian Cancer, adoptive t-cell therapy, uses a component of the patient's own white blood cells, t-cells, to attack cancer cells. These cells are harvested from each patient, expanded in the laboratory and then given back to the patient via transfusion.
- Another approach being tested by Dr. June’s team is customized vaccination. Abramson immunologists are working with Penn thoracic surgeons and medical oncologists to develop treatment vaccines for patients with non-small cell lung cancer whose tumors cannot be removed surgically or whose cancer has spread. The team is using the patient's own tumor tissue to create a vaccine customized for that individual, with promising clinical and scientific results.
BACKGROUND & CREDENTIALS
Dr. June 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 from 1978-79, and post-doctoral training in transplantation biology with Dr. E. Donnell Thomas at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle from 1983 - 1986. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology. He founded the Immune Cell Biology Program and was head of the Department of Immunology at the Naval Medical Research Institute from 1990 to 1995. He rose to Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Cell and Molecular Biology at the Uniformed Services University for the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland before assuming his current position as of February 1, 1999. He maintains a research laboratory that studies various mechanisms of lymphocyte activation that relate to immune tolerance and adoptive immunotherapy.