Julia Carnevale won an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award

Julia Carnevale won a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award.

The last decade has seen incredible advances in fighting cancer with CAR-T therapies, a type of immunotherapy that primes a patient’s own T cells to kill attack their cancer.  These engineered T cells are part of the adaptive immune system, which learns from exposure to pathogens, and have been effective in treating blood cancers. But their success in solid tumors has been more limited.

Carnevale envisions harnessing cells from the other part of the immune system, the innate immune system, which quickly responds to anything it senses as foreign — both the adaptive and the innate immune systems to fight against solid tumors. She has developed new tools to reprogram human innate immune cells called myeloid cells to enable them to go after tumor cells — and recruit T cells to help with the fight. By taking advantage of what the body can already do, she hopes to create living medicines from myeloid cells to use in the treatment of solid tumors.