The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) will honor Elizabeth M. Jaffee, MD, FAACR, AACR Past President, with the 2023 AACR–Margaret Foti Award for Leadership and Extraordinary Achievements in Cancer Research during the 2023 AACR Annual Meeting, to be held on April 14–19 in Orlando, Florida.
Elizabeth M. Jaffee, MD, FAACR
Dr. Jaffee is the Dana and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli Professor in Oncology and Deputy Director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center (SKCCC) at Johns Hopkins University, as well as inaugural Director of the Convergence Institute and Associate Director of the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at SKCCC. She is also Professor of Pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Co-Director of the Skip Viragh Center for Pancreas Cancer Clinical Research and Patient Care, and Deputy Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research.
Dr. Jaffee is being recognized for her exceptional leadership, her outstanding record of service to the cancer community, and her brilliant scientific discoveries. Her many important contributions to the field of cancer immunotherapy have significantly broadened understanding of the interaction between the immune system and pancreatic cancer, among other cancer types, and her extraordinary ability to translate preclinical findings to effective clinical approaches continues to improve the lives of patients with cancer.
Leadership and Research
The AACR–Margaret Foti Award for Leadership and Extraordinary Achievements in Cancer Research was established in 2007 in honor of Margaret Foti, PhD, MD (hc), Chief Executive Officer of the AACR, for her exemplary leadership of the AACR and her sustained dedication to the conquest of cancer through research, scholarly publications, communication, collaborations, education and training, fundraising, and science policy. Annually, this award is given to an individual whose leadership and remarkable achievements in cancer research have made a major impact in the field.
Margaret Foti, PhD, MD (hc)
An internationally heralded expert in cancer immunology, Dr. Jaffee has spearheaded innovative research that has resulted in the development and clinical evaluation of several immunotherapies. Of note, she contributed to the testing and development of an allogeneic GVAX cancer vaccine for pancreatic cancer, which delivers pancreatic cancer cells engineered to secrete the immunostimulatory cytokine granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor, thereby promoting activation of an antitumor immune response. Dr. Jaffee has also explored combinations involving GVAX and the CRS-207 vaccine.
In addition, her research also focused on exploiting genomic and proteomic technologies to define biomarkers of pancreatic cancer onset and progression. These studies have resulted in the identification of Annexin A2 as a potential regulator of pancreatic cancer metastasis. Dr. Jaffee’s ongoing work aims to use new and emerging technologies to uncover the complex signaling pathways that exist among tumor cells, monocytes, and stromal cells in pancreatic cancer as well as to develop novel methods to bypass these communications to potentiate antitumor immune responses.
