Philadelphia’s pioneering cancer scientist, Carl June, has been honored with two awards in the last month for his seminal work engineering the body’s immune system to fight cancer.

June has spent decades researching CAR-T, an immunotherapy in which regular immune cells are genetically modified to become cancer-killing super soldiers. And he says his lab’s work is far from finished.

The University of Pennsylvania scientist was chosen last week for the inaugural Broermann Medical Innovation Award for his decades of research on chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, known as CAR-T. Touted as “a living drug,” the therapy has revolutionized treatment for blood cancers, saving tens of thousands of lives since its first use in a 2010 clinical trial June co-led at Penn.

The treatment u

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