ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023

Robert Eil, MD is a surgeon-scientist with a long-term goal of advancing immunotherapies for solid cancers. Clinically, he is a fellowship-trained Surgical Oncologist with a focus on cancers involving the liver, bile ducts, and pancreas (hepatopancreatobiliary surgery). While all curative treatment approaches to these cancers include surgery, cytotoxic chemotherapies are minimally effective and recurrence is common. Dr. Eil's efforts focus on re-engineering immune cell function to develop and apply novel treatments.

Using the unique functions of T cells, a type of immune cell capable of cancer-killing behavior, significant progress has been realized over the past decade. For example, T cells engineered to express a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) have produced high rates of complete response in patients with chemotherapy-resistant hematologic malignancies (i.e. lymphoma, myeloma).

Current barriers limiting effective use of CAR-T cells against solid cancers include an immunosuppressive microenvironment and unacceptable toxicities. To augment T cell function within tumors, Dr. Eil's team continues to build upon prior work identifying ion imbalances within tumors as an unrecognized and targetable immune checkpoint that limits T cell activity (Eil R, Nature 2016 & Science 2019). To alleviate the toxicities frequently produced by CAR-T cells when used against solid cancers, they have developed novel technologies to sequester CAR-T cells targeting tumor associated antigens within metastatic tumors, which they find effective in halting off-tumor toxicity in preclinical syngeneic models of cancer.

As a surgeon scientist facing patients with metastatic and recurrent cancers, Dr. Eil is uniquely motivated and positioned to apply his findings to first-in-human investigator-initiated clinical trials.