2022 – Steven A. Rosenberg

MD, PhD, FAACR, Senior investigator in the Center for Cancer Research at the National Cancer Institute (NCI); Chief of the NCI Surgery Branch; and professor of surgery at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences

Motivation

Rosenberg is being honored for his discovery and development of the first effective cellular immunotherapies for patients with cancer, including the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy for patients with hematologic malignancies.

Rosenberg’s early research established interleukin-2 (IL-2) as a growth factor for antitumor T cells in mice and humans, and demonstrated that treating metastatic melanoma patients with high doses of IL-2 could induce long-term tumor regression. These landmark discoveries led to IL-2 becoming the first cancer immunotherapy approved by the FDA. In addition to metastatic melanoma, IL-2 has also been used to treat metastatic renal cell carcinoma patients since the 1990s.

Building on this work, Rosenberg pioneered adoptive cell immunotherapies by leveraging IL-2 activity to stimulate the growth of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) isolated from the tumors of melanoma patients. Reintroduction of these expanded TIL cell populations back into patients subsequently led to long-term tumor regression in many cases.

Rosenberg and his team have since extended this approach and generated similar promising clinical results for breast, colorectal, and liver cancer patients. They also discovered that T cells are able to be genetically modified to express chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), and that CAR-expressing T cells are able to target molecules expressed by tumor cells such as CD19 and may therefore be used to specifically target and treat chemorefractory CD19-expressing B-cell lymphomas. CD19-targeting CAR T cells have since received FDA approval for this use and for the treatment of children with acute lymphocytic leukemia.

The Pezcoller Foundation-AACR International Award for Extraordinary Achievement in Cancer Research has been assigned to Dr Rosenberg at the AACR Annual Meeting 2022 (New Orleans, April 10), where he delivered the Pezcoller Award Lecture. 
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