Dr. Robbie Majzner, an esteemed physician-scientist whose research focuses on children with intractable cancers, has been awarded the 11th annual Gale and Ira Drukier Prize in Children’s Health Research by Weill Cornell Medicine.
The Drukier Prize recognizes an early-career pediatrician whose research contributions have the potential to significantly improve the health and well-being of children and adolescents. Dr. Majzner is an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Boston Children’s Hospital.
He is being recognized for his research efforts to design better CAR T-cells, understand the cancer targets those cells attack and test the resulting therapies, particularly in children with solid tumors and cancers that develop resistance to existing treatments.
Dr. Majzner’s lab studies how CAR T-cells—genetically engineered immune cells programmed to recognize and destroy cancer cells—receive and transmit signals once they encounter a cancer cell. This understanding of how the engineered immune cells function has allowed his lab to reimagine how they are designed and deployed.
