Drs. Marko Radic and Georg Schett receive the 2024 Lupus Insight Prize from LRA Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Teodora Staeva.
On June 20 in San Francisco, the Lupus Research Alliance (LRA) honored Marko Z. Radic, PhD, professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, and Georg Schett, MD, director of Department of Medicine 3 and vice president research at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, with the 2024 Lupus Insight Prize. The prize was awarded during a ceremony at the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies (FOCIS) meeting and acknowledged the two researchers for their pioneering discoveries in using chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy in lupus patients for whom rituximab therapy had proved ineffective.
Targeting Depletion of B Cells
The LRA had partially funded a previous study by Dr. Radic, initiated in 2014, which allowed him to pursue a line of investigation that he had been following since his time as a post-doc at the Institute for Cancer Research, Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia. During his 30 years of studying lupus, Dr. Radic explained, the basic questions of understanding the drivers of the disease have gone hand in hand with thinking about the molecular interactions that form its basis. While he had been initially intrigued with DNA interactions and chromosome structure during his PhD studies (under the mentorship of Barbara A. Hamkalo, PhD, professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at the UC Irvine Dunlop School of Biological Sciences), he was exposed to the intricacies of immunology during his post-doc training, facilitated by Martin G. Weigert, PhD, Professor Emeritus in the biological sciences division at the University of Chicago and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Weigert, he says, “took me under his wing.” Once established in his own laboratory, Dr. Radic continued to follow the work of people such as Carl H. June, MD, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania, who was “trailblazing the CAR approach in cancers.” Dr. Radic began to wonder how the work with immunotherapies in oncology might translate to testing an approach with an autoimmune disease such as lupus. “Patients,” he noted, “understood that discovering the causes of lupus might be a curiosity, but they would much rather know how to get rid of this disease.”
