ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2024
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Julia Carnevale, MD is an Assistant Professor at UCSF in the UCSF-Gladstone Institute of Genomic Immunology. Dr. Carnevale obtained her MD at Harvard Medical School, completed her internal medicine residency and hematology/oncology fellowship training at UCSF, and sub-specialized in GI Oncology. Dr. Carnevale completed her postdoctoral training at UCSF where she was co-mentored by Dr. Alan Ashworth and Dr. Alex Marson. During her postdoc, Dr. Carnevale developed a novel CRISPR screening approach that enabled, for the first time, genome-wide CRISPR screening in primary human T cells (Shifrut* and Carnevale* et al., Cell, 2018). This screening approach helped identify a number of genes involved in activation and proliferation in primary human T cells. Dr. Carnevale went on to harness this technology to screen for genes that modulate T cell responses to various suppressive factors in the tumor microenvironment. Through these approaches, Dr. Carnevale focused on one particular gene target, RASA2, which is a RasGAP that had not previously been studied in any immune cell context. She went on to show that genetic disruption of RASA2 in T cell therapies can enhance their long-term effector function in a variety of preclinical cancer models (Carnevale* and Shifrut* et al., Nature, 2022). The Carnevale lab, opened in August 2022, focuses on developing new ways to model intra-tumoral conditions to discover genetic engineering strategies to rewire immune cells for cancer treatment. Dr. Carnevale is also involved in clinical trials to test immunotherapies, including cell therapies, in solid tumors and refractory hematological cancers. Through her laboratory work and clinical practice, she is merging her expertise to employ immune cell therapies in the treatment of aggressive solid tumors.