International Leader in Immunotherapy, Carl June, MD, to Address Drexel College of Medicine Class of 2025 During Commencement

Carl H. June, MD, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania, will address the Drexel University College of Medicine class of 2025 at its commencement ceremony on May 16. June is also director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Penn.

The ceremony will be held at the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts, 300 S. Broad Street, where 573 degrees will be presented, including 298 medical degrees and more than 275 PhD and master’s degrees from the college’s Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and Professional Studies.

The June Laboratory studies various mechanisms of lymphocyte activation that relate to immune tolerance and adoptive immunotherapy for cancer and chronic infection. In 2011, June’s research team published findings detailing a new therapy in which patients with refractory and relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia were treated with genetically engineered versions of their own T cells. The treatment has also been used with promising results to treat children with refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The June Laboratory has published more than 500 papers, which have been cited more than 100,000 times.

June is the recipient numerous awards, including the William B. Coley Award from the Cancer Research Institute, the Richard V. Smalley Memorial Award from the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer, the AACR-CRI Lloyd J. Old Award in Cancer Immunology, the Karl Landsteiner Memorial Award from the American Association of Blood Banks, and a lifetime achievement award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. He was also elected into the National Academies of Medicine and Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

June earned his undergraduate degree from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and his medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine. June completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at the National Naval Medical Center, followed by a fellowship in oncology at the University of Washington. June’s graduate training was in immunology and malaria with Paul-Henri Lambert, MD at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and postdoctoral training in transplantation biology with E. Donnell Thomas, MD and John Hansen, MD, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

For his vast contributions to the fields of oncology and immunology, Drexel will be conferring upon Carl H. June the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa.