Chats with our Scientific Advisory Board: George Demetri, MD and Charles Sawyers, MD with Christopher Ung on Immunotherapies

Immunotherapy pioneers Charles Sawyers and George Demetri sat down with our Chief Scientific business officer Christopher Ung to discuss immunotherapy, how it’s advancing in solid tumors, and what the future looks like- from deliver systems and different CAR types to how AI might advance our options, and where human judgement is still essential.  

CellCarta partners with translational medicine, biomarker, and clinical development teams to generate reliable, regulatory-ready data for complex clinical programs. With fully owned and harmonized laboratory operations across North America, Europe, Australia, and China, CellCarta delivers integrated capabilities spanning immunology, histopathology, proteomics, and genomics, including for CAR and immunotherapy programs, supported by comprehensive sample management and logistics solutions.  

About our SAB Members:

George Demetri, MD, FASCO 

George Demetri, MD, FASCO has dedicated his career to translational research aimed at understanding and treating precisely-defined subsets of cancers. He was a pioneer in the development of imatinib (Gleevec®), the first cancer therapy targeting gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) as a molecularly defined subset of sarcoma. Subsequently, his work has contributed to the U.S. FDA and worldwide regulatory approvals of several other “smart drugs” for cancer, including sunitinib (Sutent®) and regorafenib (Stivarga®) for GIST, tazemetostat (Tazverik®) for epithelioid sarcomas, as well as pazopanib (Votrient®) and trabectedin (Yondelis®) for other sarcomas. In a related contribution, Dr. Demetri served on the Scientific Advisory Board for Plexxikon to help develop the first mutant BRAF inhibitor, vemurafenib (Zelboraf®), a mutation-targeted therapy for a subset of melanomas. Most recently, he helped starting Blueprint Medicines in Cambridge, MA, which recently announced the U.S. FDA approval of avapritinib (Ayvakit®) for a mutationally-defined subset of GIST. 

He received his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from Harvard College, then was a research fellow at the Universite of Besancon, France before receiving his medical degree from Stanford University School of Medicine. Subsequently, he completed his residency and became Chief Residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle before training as a fellow in Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, where he has served as an Attending Physician since 1989. 

Dr. Demetri is a Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School (HMS), where he is co-Director of the Ludwig Center at Harvard and a co-director of the HMS post-graduate course entitled “High Impact Cancer Research: Cancer Biology and Therapeutics”. He also teaches a Harvard College Freshman Seminar on the Scientific, Ethical and Humanistic Aspects of Cancer. He has served on the Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and now chairs the AACR Science Policy and Government Affairs Committee. Dr. Demetri was a founding director of the annual AACR special workshop on Translational Cancer Research for the Basic Scientist. He also serves as a member of the Board of Directors for Blueprint Medicines and Translate Bio, both in Cambridge Massachusetts. 

Charles Sawyers, MD 

Charles L. Sawyers received a BA from Princeton University in 1981 and an MD from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1985, and completed his internal medicine residency at UCSF. He became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2002 while at UCLA, and then moved to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2006 where he currently serves as the Chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program. 

Sawyers studies mechanisms of cancer drug resistance with an eye toward developing novel therapies. He co-discovered the antiandrogen drug enzalutamide (Xtandi®) that was approved by the FDA in 2012 for treatment of advanced prostate cancer. He shared the 2009 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for the development of the ABL kinase inhibitor imatinib for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia and the second generation ABL inhibitor dasatinib to overcome imatinib resistance. He received the 2013 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the 2013 Taubman Prize for Excellence in Translational Medical Science and the 2015 BBVA Knowledge Award in Biomedicine. 

Sawyers is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine (formerly IOM) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is past President of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), was appointed to the National Cancer Advisory Board by President Obama and has served on the Board of Directors of Novartis since 2013. He also serves as Steering Committee Chair of the AACR Project GENIE, an international consortium of cancer centers who share genomic and clinical data from patients treated at their respective clinical sites.