OCTOBER 21, 2024, NEW YORK – Ludwig Cancer Research congratulates Ludwig Lausanne Director George Coukos on his election to the U.S. National Academy of Medicine (NAM). Among the highest honors issued to clinicians and scientists, membership in the Academy recognizes exceptional achievement and commitment to service in the fields of health and medicine.
In naming Coukos to its membership, the NAM cited Coukos for his landmark discovery of “the correlation between T-cell infiltration and favorable prognosis in ovarian cancer, an observation later generalized to all human tumors.”
When Coukos made this discovery more than two decades ago, the prevailing view in the field was that most cancers, including ovarian cancer, are unlikely to be responsive to immune targeting. Coukos’s discovery upended that dogma and helped lay the groundwork for currently widespread efforts to treat a broad variety of solid tumors with immunotherapy.
The NAM also noted Coukos’s subsequent work revealing how the blood vessels that feed tumors serve as an active barrier to anti-tumor T cells, and his demonstration that therapies that normalize the tumor vasculature can drive T cell infiltration and fuel the immune rejection of malignancies.
This work has spawned therapeutic strategies combining anti-angiogenic drugs with immunotherapies that, the Academy noted, are “showing significant benefit” in the treatment of many types of tumors.
These achievements, we add, just scratch the surface of Coukos’s contributions to tumor immunology and immunotherapy. Since being named director of the Lausanne Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in 2015, Coukos has overseen a renaissance in our understanding of the tumor microenvironment and its manipulation for cancer therapy. His parallel work in the design, clinical development and streamlined delivery of personalized immunotherapies—and promising combinations of immunotherapy with other treatments, including radiotherapy—have put Ludwig Lausanne on the world map as a hotspot for innovation in the field.
We can think of few people more deserving of the recognition and high honor of membership in the NAM.