Novartis has awarded the 2016 Novartis Prize for Clinical Immunotherapy to Carl H. June, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the department of pathology & laboratory medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and director of Translational Research in Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center. Dr. June was chosen for his work developing personalized cellular therapies for cancer using Chimeric Antigen Receptor T cells (CAR T cells), a technology which modifies a patient’s own cells to attack their cancers. Dr. June’s team at Penn achieved the first successful and sustained demonstration of the use of CAR T cell therapy, an investigational approach in which a patient’s cells are removed through an apheresis process similar to dialysis and modified in Penn’s cell and vaccine production facilities.

He shares this year’s prize with Zelig Eshhar, of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, and Steven Rosenberg, of the National Institutes of Health.

The Novartis Prizes for Immunology are awarded every three years for breakthrough contributions to the fields of basic and clinical immunology and can be shared between as many as three scientists.