At the University of Pennsylvania, Carl H. June, MD, is the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine; director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the Perelman School of Medicine; and director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. He also directs a research laboratory that studies various mechanisms of lymphocyte activation that relate to immune tolerance and adoptive immunotherapy for cancer and chronic infection. 

In 2011, Dr. June and his 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 now also been used with promising results to treat children with refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia.  

Dr. June has published more than 350 manuscripts and is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including election to the Institute of Medicine in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014, William B. Coley Award, Richard V. Smalley Memorial Award from the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer, AACR-CRI Lloyd J. Old Award in Cancer Immunology, Philadelphia Award in 2012, Taubman Prize for Excellence in Translational Medical Science in 2014 (shared with S. Grupp, B. Levine and D. Porter), Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (shared with J. Allison), Novartis Prize in Immunology (shared with Z. Eshaar and S. Rosenberg), Karl Landsteiner Memorial Award, Debrecen Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Dr. June received the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy’s Edward Netter Leadership Award in 2019. In 2022, Dr. June received the Keio Medical Science Prize, which is awarded by Japan’s oldest private university, Keio University.

Dr. June is a graduate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He had graduate training in Immunology and malaria with Dr. Paul-Henri Lambert at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, from 1978 to 1979 and post-doctoral training in transplantation biology with E. Donnell Thomas and John Hansen at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle from 1983 to 1986. Dr. June is board certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology.