George Coukos

​​​​​George Coukos has dedicated his career to elucidate fundamental mechanisms in the tumor microenvironment (TME) that determine the fate of antitumor immunity, especially mechanisms underlying the deregulation of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), with a strong translational angle during discovery, and a steady effort to take lessons from the lab to the clinic. He has consistently positioned himself at the interface between discovery and clinical translation. While at Penn, his discovery and translational focus concentrated largely on ovarian cancer. He founded a patient-oriented Ovarian Cancer Research Center integrating discovery and clinical translation, considered as a model for translational centers of excellence. He is credited with the discovery of antitumor immunity in ovarian cancer, which challenged the previous dogma that solid tumors are by and large immunologically ignored. Subsequently, his lab at Penn focused primarily on deciphering mechanisms of immune deregulation driving T cell exclusion and dysfunction in ovarian tumors, specifically on the immune regulatory role of the tumor endothelial barrier, while on the translational side he sought to strengthen natural antitumor immunity pharmacologically and through in-house developed cell based therapies. At the Lausanne University Hospital, he established his lab with aiming to effectively mobilize immunity to create adoptive T cell therapy opportunities for solid tumors. His lab focused on understanding the principles and hallmarks of successful antitumor immune attack, learning from human steady state or therapeutic interventions, to rationally design synthetic immunity. He established an integrated team discovery program, the Human Integrated Tumor Immunity Discovery Engine (Hi-TIDe), focused in developing rational T cell therapies for solid tumors using systems biology and systems engineering principles.