The Pezcoller Foundation–American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) International Award for Extraordinary Achievement in Cancer Research was presented to Steven A. Rosenberg, MD, PhD, at the Association’s 2022 Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans. Dr. Rosenberg was honored for his discovery and development of the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved immunotherapy for patients with cancer and for his contributions to effective cellular immunotherapies, including chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy for patients with hematologic malignancies.
Dr. 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 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 since the 1990s.
Steven A. Rosenberg, MD, PhD
Further Accomplishments
Building on this work, Dr. Rosenberg pioneered adoptive cell immunotherapies by leveraging IL-2 activity to stimulate the growth of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes isolated from the tumors of melanoma patients. Reintroduction of these expanded tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes cell populations back into patients subsequently led to long-term tumor regression in many cases.
Dr. Rosenberg and his team have since extended this approach and generated similar promising clinical results for patients with breast, colorectal, and liver cancer. They also discovered that T cells can be genetically modified to express CARs, and that CAR-expressing T cells are able to target molecules, such as CD19, expressed by tumor cells 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 patients with acute lymphocytic leukemia, mantle cell lymphoma, and follicular lymphoma.
Dr. Rosenberg is 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.
