Dr. Carl June, Cancer Buster

During a 20-year career in the U.S. Navy, immunologist Carl H. June studied radioactivity, HIV, and bone marrow transplants. But it was the 1996 diagnosis of his wife, Cynthia, with ovarian cancer that galvanized him to look beyond the lab. She died of the disease in 2001. “It gave me a real impetus to make something happen clinically, which is a lot harder than research in mice,” he says. Now a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, June is drawing on his lifetime of laboratory work to perfect a gene therapy that has drawn attention in the oncology field because it eradicated cancer in two patients with terminal leukemia.

The disease is often treated with a bone marrow transplant, but many patients’ bodies reject the foreign matter. The side effects are “horrendous,” says June, 58, and kill about 20 percent of people who undergo the procedure.