Professor Tak Wah Mak receives prestigious Coley Award
The Cancer Research Institute (CRI), a New York-based nonprofit organisation dedicated to harnessing the immune system’s power to control and potentially cure all cancers, will confer the prestigious 2023 William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology on Professor Tak W. Mak of the University Health Network in Canada and the University of Hong Kong. Professor Mak is a former Trustee and Chairman of the Croucher Foundation.
CRI’s highest scientific honour, this award recognises Professor Mak’s profound discoveries throughout his career that helped establish the foundations of uT cell immunology. Professor Mak is a long-standing member of the CRI Scientific Advisory Council and serves on the Postdoctoral Fellowship Review Committee.
Overall, his contributions have propelled the immunotherapy field forward, making many of today’s life-saving treatments possible. Most notably, Dr. Mak cracked a very important code: that of the T cell receptor (TCR).
In the 1980s, the biggest mystery in immunology was how T cells interact with target cells and their antigens. By correctly predicting the sequence of the TCR beta chain, Dr. Mak unraveled the blueprint for T cells’ remarkable specificity with respect to recognizing antigens. This momentous achievement revolutionized our understanding of immune responses and laid the foundation for significant advancements in the field of immunology.
This paved the way for T cell therapies and deeper exploration of our immune system. The first CAR T cell therapy was approved for leukemia in 2017, and six are now approved to treat patients with lymphoma and multiple myeloma as well. Other promising T cell therapies utilizing customized, engineered TCRs are now in clinical trials for solid tumors normally resistant to immunotherapies.
After discovering the TCR’s structure and function, Professor Mak’s team concentrated on teasing out other crucial pathways governing T cell biology and behavior during immune responses, pioneering the use of genetically modified mice to do so. These efforts paid off in 1995 with the revelation that CTLA-4 acted as an immune checkpoint or ’brake’— finding that mice lacking it suffered from severe immune overactivation.
The following year, Professor James P. Allison, the director of the CRI Scientific Advisory Council, capitalised on this insight by demonstrating that blocking CTLA-4 in mice enabled their T cells to kill their cancer. In 2011, Dr. Allison’s anti-CTLA-4 ipilimumab became the first checkpoint inhibitor approved by the FDA. Dr. Allison would go on to receive the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work.
CRI recognized the value of the work being done in Dr. Mak’s lab early on, first providing funding in 1985 and continuing to do so to this day. A CRI-funded CLIP Investigator himself from 2016-2018, Dr. Mak has sponsored sixteen CRI fellows in his lab over the last five decades.
“The CRI has always been a staunch supporter of our work, funding many of my lab’s postdoctoral fellows, without whom key discoveries would not have been made,” said Professor Mak. “I will be proud to share the prestige of the William B. Coley Award with all of my lab team members and use this accolade to further boost our efforts to improve cancer immunotherapy.”
Professor Allison commented on the decision to recognise the contribution of Professor Mak: “From his early work that determined the function of a variety of molecules involved in T cell development and function, his first cloning of the genes encoding human T cell antigen receptors, to his more recent studies linking the immune and nervous systems, Tak Mak has led the way in research in crucial areas of immunology. On top of all that, he has written a comprehensive textbook on immunology, been a leader in biotechnology, and served on many important advisory boards, including long-standing participation in the programs of the Cancer Research Institute.”
Professor Tak Wah Mak FRS
Professor Mak is ranked 9th internationally and 1st in Canada in Molecular Biology in the recently announced Research.com 2023 Top Scientists Rankings. He was conferred Honorary Degree by the Johns Hopkins University on 25 May this year.
Professor Mak is currently Director of the Centre for Oncology and Immunology, Honorary Professor, Department of Pathology, School of Clinical Medicine, HKUMed, as well as a senior scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics and Immunology at the University of Toronto. Prior to the Coley Award, Professor Mak, whose research has been cited more than 170,000 times, has received numerous awards and honours, and election into the Royal Society of London and the US National Academy of Sciences.
Professor Mak was a Trustee of the Croucher Foundation for over thirteen years including nine years as our Chairman.