2024 Canada Gairdner Award Winners Announced

Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

Director, Center for Cell Engineering, Stephen and Barbara Friedman Chair, Sloan Kettering Institute, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA

Both Eshhar’s and Sadelain’s trailblazing research into CAR T cell engineering spans many decades. Their combined efforts defined the pathway for the future of cellular immunotherapy to treat cancer.

Eshhar has focused his career around the genetic engineering of T cells. These studies led him to predict that combining the killing machinery of cytotoxic T cells with an antibody’s specificity and high affinity to a target, would lead to new T cell-based therapies. He developed the first chimeric antigen receptor system in the 1980s and introduced it into T cells armed with an anti-tumor specificity. Eshhar went on to demonstrate the ability of such CAR T cells to successfully treat cancer in animal models. Sadelain began investigating what would eventually be referred to as CAR T cell therapy in the late 1980s, publishing his first abstract on successful T-cell engineering in 1992. Over the next decade, Sadelain and his team improved upon Eshhar’s design and by 2002 built the first truly effective CAR T cells, paving the way for their clinical use. Key to this breakthrough was the demonstration that CD19, a molecule on white blood cells, could serve as an effective target for CAR T cells in blood-borne cancers.

These second-generation CAR T cells were able to survive, proliferate and kill cancer cells in the lab, which established the feasibility and proof of concept for producing genetically instructed, targeted immune responses. In 2003, Sadelain and his colleagues published a seminal research paper showing that human CD19-directed CAR T cells could eradicate leukemia cells in a mouse model. Soon afterwards, clinical trials led by different groups, including Dr. Sadelain’s, demonstrated that the tumor burden in refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia and adult and pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia could be successfully reduced and eventually become undetectable. The first CAR T cell therapies, targeting CD19, were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2017 for use in children and young adults with refractory acute leukemias and certain refractory lymphomas.

Efforts are underway to expand the repertoire of cancers that can be treated by CAR T cells through identifying new target antigens in solid tumors. The success of CAR T cells has also fueled interest in expanding their application beyond cancer. CAR T cells are demonstrating high response rates in autoimmune diseases and are being investigated as potential treatments for additional disorders, including fibrosis, senescence-associated pathologies and infectious diseases.

Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge

Professor of Biophysical Chemistry, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge

CEO and Co-founder of Alphanosos; Honorary Chair at the Institute for Advanced Study of the University of Strasbourg (USIAS)

Balasubramanian, Klenerman and Mayer are recognized for developing the underlying methodologies that led to Solexa-Illumina Next Generation DNA Sequencing (NGS), a technology that has enhanced our basic understanding of life, converting biosciences into ‘big science’ by enabling fast, accurate, low-cost and large-scale genome sequencing – the process of determining the complete DNA sequence of an organism.

Adjunct Professor, Christian Medical College, Vellore, India; Director, Enteric, Diagnostics, Genomics and Epidemiology, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Gagandeep Kang received her training in medicine and microbiology at the Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore, in southern India. She is Professor of Microbiology at CMC, where her research group has established substantial community-based birth cohort studies addressing childhood enteric infections, growth, and development for over 20 years. Using data and insights from these studies, alongside immunological, mechanistic, epidemiological and implementation research, Prof. Kang has generated extensive information on the complex interactions between the environment and infections in children, and the influence of prior infections on subsequent responses to vaccination. Through extensive, cross disciplinary work drawing on field epidemiology, molecular understanding of infectious agents and infections, clinical trials and policy implementation, she explored the complex relationships between enteric diseases, gut function, and physical and cognitive development in affected children. Prof. Kang conducted the largest single birth cohort study on rotaviral infections in the world, demonstrating that protection after a natural infection is lower in India than in developed countries, which has important implications for the control of diseases by vaccination.

Gagandeep Kang has built an internationally recognized and competitive research program centred in India that prioritizes Indian needs while providing valuable and translatable insights to other regions affected by enteric infections. In addition to understanding the mechanism of infection and its effects on individuals, Kang’s group has used geographic information systems to connect virus prevalence at the community level to cost of illness studies, resulting in India becoming the only low-income country with comprehensive disease burden estimates for which cost-effectiveness of vaccination for multiple clinical outcomes could be predicted, as well as new vaccine roll-out programs. By 2019, all 26 million children born annually in India were eligible to receive the rotavirus vaccine, which has the potential to reduce infections, associated complications and death of vulnerable children.

Professor, Pediatrics and Child Health, University of Manitoba; Research Scientist, Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba; Director of Science & Knowledge Mobilization, THRiVE Discovery Lab; Co-Director, Manitoba Interdisciplinary Lactation Centre (MILC); Canada Research Chair, Early Nutrition and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease

Dr. Azad is a renowned research leader whose groundbreaking work is pushing the boundaries of knowledge generation and translation in the important areas of infant nutrition, lactation, maternal-child health, and the developmental origins of disease. Moreover, she is highly dedicated to enriching the scientific community in Canada through her commitment to recruiting and training new researchers, supporting science literacy among Canadian children and the general public, and engaging Canadian policymakers to foster support for science and evidence-based policy-making.

Professor of biology and biochemistry, Laval University; Canada Research Chair in Cellular Systems and Synthetic Biology

Christian Landry has brought an entirely new perspective to systems biology, in which networks, such as protein-protein interactions, and cellular signaling, are investigated in the context of historical evolutionary forces in order to better understand their fundamental properties. His work is of critical importance to health and human disease since all organisms evolve through the same principles, including pathogens impacting humans. His recent research has ranged from investigations of the evolution of resistance to antifungal drugs, host-pathogen arms races, and evolutionary trade-offs in cellular processes and networks, to systems biology studies of microbial interactions.