Won Jun Kim Named Weintraub Award Recipient

Won joined the Weill Cornell/Rockefeller/Sloan Kettering Tri-Institutional MD-PhD Program in 2019. He completed his undergraduate studies at the California Institute of Technology, followed by a post-bac at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He joined Dr. Abdel-Wahab’s laboratory in 2021, where he tested whether cancer-specific RAN mis-splicing events are translated into actionable neoantigens that are shared across patients, and whether these “public” neoantigens can serve as targets for T-cell receptor (TCR) therapeutics. His findings, published in Cell, catalog clinical actionable mis-splicing-derived neoantigens and neoantigen-reactive TCRs that are applicable across patients and provide proof-of-concept for re-directing T cells to these neoantigens in myeloid leukemias. These findings have direct clinical significance and therapeutic implications, as the neoantigens and TCRs he identified can be tested in future preclinical and clinical studies for neoantigen-based immunotherapies such as TCR-T cell therapy, TCR bispecific antibody, and cancer vaccines. His work also describes high-throughput methods to characterize and isolate rare, neoantigen-reactive CD8+ T cells in both healthy donors and patients, and provides molecular insight into immune dysfunction in patients with myeloid leukemia.

Won has returned to medical school to complete the MD portion of his studies.