2024 Warren Alpert Prize winners honored at symposium

Harvard Medical School hosted a scientific symposium Oct. 10 in honor of the 2024 Warren Alpert Foundation Prize winners, whose discoveries led to the creation of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy. This type of treatment modifies patients’ immune cells and optimizes their ability to eliminate cancer cells.

The Warren Alpert Foundation awards this $500,000 annual prize, administered by HMS, in recognition of work that has improved the understanding, prevention, and treatment of disease. CAR T-cell therapy has saved the lives of tens of thousands of adults and children with blood cancers, including leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. 

“The collective work of the four scientists honored this year has propelled the treatment of blood cancers into a new era of immune therapy and added an invaluable new tool to our armamentarium,” said HMS Dean George Q. Daley, AB ’82, MD ’91, PhD, who chairs the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize scientific advisory committee. 

The award recipients were: 

• Renier Brentjens, MD, PhD, Katherine Anne Gioia Endowed Chair of Medicine and deputy director at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.
• Zelig Eshhar, PhD, professor emeritus at the Weizmann Institute of Science and chair of immunology in the Division of Research and Development at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center.
• Carl June, MD, Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.
• Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, Stephen and Barbara Friedman Chair and founding director of the Center for Cell Engineering at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.