On September 27, 2022, the Cancer Research Institute (CRI) presented the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology to Feng Shao, Ph.D., of the CPL, Judy Lieberman, M.D., Ph.D., and Hao Wu, Ph.D., of Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and Vishva Dixit, M.D., of Genentech for their collective work that revealed the role of the pore-forming gasdermins in pyroptosis and promotion of antitumor immunity that set the stage for targeting gasdermins in cancer therapeutics. Prof. Shao is the first native Chinese scientist since 1979 who have won this award in recognition of his original innovation work. He gave a keynote speech on behalf of the recipients at its award ceremony.
The Cancer Research Institute established this award in 1975 in honor of Dr. William B. Coley, a pioneer of cancer immunotherapy. Considered CRI’s highest scientific accolade, it has been given to one or more scientists for seminal discoveries in the field of basic immunology and cancer immunology. Over the years, its distinguished recipients have deepened our knowledge of the immune response to cancer and other diseases and advanced the development of effective immunotherapies.
Many recipients of the Coley Award have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize, including Ralph M. Steinman (1998), Jules A. Hoffmann (2003), Bruce A. Beutler (2006) who jointly received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and James P. Allisonv (2015) and Tasuku Honjo (2014), sharing the same prize in 2018. Chinese scientist Lieping Chen of Yale University School of Medicine is a 2014 William B. Coley Award winner for his discovery of the B7-H1/PD-1 pathway and its application in cancer therapy, and Zhijian “James” Chen a 2020 winner for his role in the discovery and characterization of the cGAS-STING pathway.
In 2015, Feng Shao identified GSDMD whose cleavage by caspase determines pyroptosis, marking the first in history. He has continued to investigate on other members in the Gasdermin Family like GSDME and GSDMB for the past ten years. Based on the relevance of pyroptosis in innate immunity activation, he blazed a way in eliciting pyroptosis to boost antitumour immunity. These works not only redefined the biological meaning of pyroptosis, but also deeply shaken the conventional understanding of apoptosis.