Dear colleagues, my dear ladies and gentlemen,

Dear Lawrence, dear Guido, dear Alice,

very welcome to Erlang.

It's my great pleasure to give today the laudation for Lawrence Sittvogel,

the winner of the Jakob Herz Prize,

in recognition of her contribution to tumor immunology research.

I met Lawrence Sittvogel more than 20 years ago

when I had a meeting with my former colleagues at the Institut Gustave Rossi in Paris,

where I did my postdoc from 1999 to 1993,

Rossi au Douzième Etage avec Thierry Asson.

I was introduced to Lawrence, a new attending clinician and researcher

who had just returned from the United States after three years spent in a cancer immunology research lab.

I was immediately impressed by this petite, energetic, charming and self-confident woman

who stood in front of me to discuss her thousand ideas about using immunotherapy to fight tumors.

Lawrence's passionate discussions about tumor immunology inspired not only me,

but a lot of other students as well as scientists and doctors all over the world.

Let me share a quote from Lawrence.

A doctor who doesn't think scientifically can't understand what they are doing with their patients.

I think she is right.

Lawrence was born in France in the suburb of Paris from a family of artisans,

and when she was six years old she already announced to her family that she would become a doctor.

Lawrence attended La Pitié-Cyprier Medical School in Paris and very early decided to specialize in oncology.

Frustrated by her training in clinical oncology and saddened by the bleak outcome of her patients,

Lawrence decided to take some time off from the clinical training to learn about immunology

as she had become fascinated by the process of vaccination and immune protection.

Intrigued by the work of Dr. Steven Rosenberg, a surgical oncologist at the NIH and a pioneer of tumor immunotherapy,

she decided to join the laboratory of Dr. Michael Lotze, a former Rosenberg trainee who was leading a cancer immunology laboratory at Pittsburgh University.

After a Saksfest full time there, she returned to Paris to start her own laboratory at the Institut de Carostophologie,

Cancer Research Institute, where she has been since.

You can see here her group in 2006 and you can see Evelyn Ulrich, one of my former co-workers who did the postdoc,

and I also see some former collaborators, Caroline Florman, a technician who already worked with me in 1991 in the lab.

And you can also see in 2017 the group is expanding enormously.

Soon after starting her laboratory, she became interested in the role of targeted and conventional therapy on the immune system.

She discovered that Imatinib, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor targeting the oncogenic kinases BCIA-ABL and C-KIT,

promotes tumor response partly through its ability to stimulate natural killer cells to attack tumor cells.

You can see here the tumor cells that when they overexpress the C-KIT receptor,

do express or induce IDO, which is a strong inhibitor of the immune response,

and she could show when Imatinib is blocking the C-KIT pathway,

you can re-induce the immune system indirectly by activating dendritic cells and then activating NK cells.

This finding dramatically influenced her subsequent research with Professor Guido Krömer.

It is at the Institut Gustave Rossi that Laurence met Guido for the first time,

a meeting that was to transform their personal and professional life.

In contrast to most tumor immunologists at that time, who focused mainly on the identification of tumor antigens and adoptive teeth therapies,

Laurence and Guido, inspired by Laurence's finding on the immunogenic role of Imatinib and Guido's work on the mechanism of cell death,

started to question whether all types of cell death were equal and search for compounds that could induce tumor cell death

in a way that could be recognized by the immune system.

They tested hundreds of compounds for more than 10 years, and together they finally discovered that anthracycline and oxalipatin,

two common chemotherapeutic agents, can induce a type of cancer cell death that elicits an antitumor immune response,

hence allowing the immune system to control residual tumor cells.

They identified the distinct molecular alteration that lead a dying cell to induce an immune response,