Congratulations to Dr. Laura Evgin for being selected as one of the 2025 Canada Gairdner Early Career Investigators for her work in CAR T-cell therapy.
Dr. Evgin is a scientist in the Genome Sciences Department at the BC Cancer Research Institute (BCCRI) and an assistant professor in the Department of Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She earned her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Ottawa under the guidance of Dr. John Bell, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where she worked with Dr. Richard Vile.
In 2020, Dr. Evgin established her research group at the BCCRI, focusing on enhancing the efficacy and accessibility of T-cell therapies for cancer treatment. Dr. Evgin's laboratory leverages diverse tools and model systems to design innovative chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) constructs, develop CAR T-cell engineering strategies both ex vivo and in vivo, and evaluate CAR T-cell function in immune-competent models of cancer and autoimmune diseases.
"The innovation of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy has transformed cancer treatment, advanced synthetic immunology research, expanded cell therapy infrastructure and regulatory frameworks, and offered new hope to thousands of cancer patients. We are now at a particularly exciting time where CAR T-cell therapy is standard of care for multiple hematologic cancers, and this success has inspired a wave of new CAR applications beyond oncology, with early promising results for patients with autoimmune diseases. It is a privilege to lead a lab that builds on the work of Drs. Michel Sadelain and Zelig Eshhar, and I am deeply honoured to have been recognized by this year's winners."
Find the full list of 2024 Canada Gairdner Early Career Investigators recipients here.
With files from the Gairdner Foundation.