Michel Sadelain Awarded BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Prize for Revolutionizing Cancer Treatment with Cell Therapies
Michel Sadelain, director of the Columbia Initiative in Cell Engineering and Therapy (CICET), has been awarded a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Prize in Biology and Biomedicine for revolutionizing cancer treatment with CAR-T cell therapy, which modifies a patient’s own T cells to seek and destroy cancer cells.
The award, shared with Carl June of the University of Pennsylvania, recognizes the researchers’ roles in pioneering techniques to isolate T cells from a patient’s immune system and outfit the cells with synthetic receptors to enable them to recognize and kill cancer cells when infused back into the patient’s body.
First envisioned in the early 1990s, chimeric antibody receptor T-cell therapies targeting CD19, a protein expressed in leukemias and lymphomas, showed early promise in laboratory and preclinical studies conducted by both researchers.
In 2017, the FDA approved the first CAR-T therapy for the treatment of patients with B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia whose cancer had progressed after treatment with chemotherapy. Since then, seven CAR-T therapies have been approved by the FDA and used to treat over 50,000 patients with blood cancers such as leukemia, lymphomas, and myelomas, leading to remission for many.
“It is now widely accepted that engineered immunity exemplified by CAR-T cells can succeed where no other treatment, chemotherapy, or bone marrow transplantation has before,” Sadelain says.
Currently, Sadelain and others at CICET are working to adapt CAR-T cell therapy for the treatment of a variety of solid tumors, infectious diseases, and autoimmune disorders.
“I believe there’s every reason to be optimistic that in the next few years, certainly the next decade, we will have effective CAR-T cell therapies for brain tumors and other solid cancers,” Sadelain says. “And recently, we have seen remarkable responses to CAR-T therapies in patients with autoimmune diseases such as lupus.”
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Michel Sadelain, the Herbert and Florence Irving Professor of Medicine at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, is the inaugural director of the Columbia Initiative in Cell Engineering and Therapy, a University-wide program to expand research into cell and gene therapies. He also directs the Cancer Cell Therapy Initiative in Columbia University’s Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Sadelain is a previous recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Canada Gairdner International Award, and the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize. In 2025, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.