Acceptance Speech – Bern, 14.11.2025

USA

Carl H. June

2025 Balzan Prize for Gene and Gene-Modified Cell Therapy

For having invented and developed a genetically engineered cellular therapy (CAR-T cells) which has cured fatal haematological cancers and holds promise for the treatment of autoimmune diseases and solid tumors. His work has paved the way to a new realm of cellular therapy and synthetic biology with a broad impact in Medicine.

President of the National Council,

Presidents of the Balzan Foundation,

Chair and Members of the General Prize Committee,

Distinguished assembly,

To the International Balzan Prize Foundation and the General Prize Committee, thank you. I am profoundly grateful and deeply humbled to receive this prestigious award. To be recognized by a foundation with such a profound commitment to humanity’s most vital cultural and scientific endeavors is an honor of the highest order.

The Balzan Prize acknowledges a revolution in medicine. For decades, my work has been driven by a simple, yet audacious belief: that the most elegant, precise, and powerful cures for our most devastating diseases reside within the human body itself.

My journey began as a physician, frustrated by the blunt instruments we had to fight advanced cancer. We had poisons and burns from chemotherapy and radiation. It became my life’s mission to find a better way – to unlock the latent power of our own immune system. The T-cell, a sentinel of that system, became our focus. It is a living drug, capable of hunting, adapting, and remembering. The challenge was that cancer is a master of disguise. Our breakthrough, Chimeric Antigen Receptor or CAR T-cell therapy, was to genetically reprogram a patient’s own cells, effectively giving them a new guidance system to find and eradicate cancer.

But this science left the laboratory and found its soul in our first pediatric patient, Emily Whitehead in 2012. She was near death from leukemia, with no other options. To witness her own engineered T-cells rescue her from the brink, and then to watch her grow up, cancer-free for over a decade, is the single greatest privilege of my career. That moment transformed a scientific concept into a human reality. It is the moment science becomes hope.

Today, I believe we are only at the end of the beginning. The future of this platform is vast: we are working relentlessly to make it effective against solid tumors, to create “off-the-shelf” therapies that are more accessible and affordable, and to extend this technology beyond cancer to treat autoimmune diseases and other conditions.

The core lesson is this: the cure is within us. This award is a testament to that idea. It belongs not just to me, but to my extraordinary team at the University of Pennsylvania, to the international community of scientists who have been our colleagues and competitors, and above all, to the courageous patients and families who entrust us with their lives.

To the Balzan Foundation, thank you for this incredible honor and for championing the power of science to serve humanity.

Thank you.