In 2023, Jeffrey S. Weber, MD, PhD, was interviewed after being named a Fellow of the Academy of Immuno-Oncology.
Weber died Aug. 18, 2024.
The Academy of Immuno-Oncology was established by the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer to honor individuals who have launched the field of cancer immunotherapy into the breakthrough cancer treatment it is today and bring together the brightest minds in the field to continue to advance SITC, the field, and the next generation of immuno-oncologists.
Annually, SITC conducts an open call for nominations and inducts a new class of Fellows into the Academy of Immuno-Oncology, one of the society’s most prestigious honors. (Actively serving nomination committee members or Board members are not eligible for nomination.) Fellows of the Academy of Immuno-Oncology bear the designation “FAIO.”
Professor Weber, then deputy director of the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center (PCC), worked with a multidisciplinary team of medical and surgical oncologists, dermatologists, and pathologists to treat patients with melanomas ranging from the most common early lesions to the most complex. He served as co-director of PCC’s Melanoma Research Program, and is head of Experimental Therapeutics at PCC, overseeing work in early developmental therapeutics.
Professor Weber’s clinical and research interests were primarily in the field of immunotherapy for cancer. He worked at the forefront of new ideas in immunotherapy for treating patients with melanoma and managing the side effects of these novel therapies. He has been instrumental in the development of ipilimumab for melanoma, publishing some of the earliest papers showing its efficacy, and was an early advocate for the use of checkpoint inhibition as adjuvant treatment, culminating in the publication of the New England Journal of Medicine work showing benefit for the PD-1 antibody nivolumab compared to ipilimumab for resected high risk melanoma. He was also involved in a large variety of clinical trials, including trials for melanoma vaccines, protocols involving adoptive cell therapy, and novel immunotherapy trials for patients with melanoma.
Professor Weber was the principal investigator of a number of ongoing studies funded by the National Cancer Institute, including trials in clinical drug development and managing the autoimmune side effects of immunotherapy for melanoma. He was the chair of the CONC study section of NCI and of the VA’s Clinical Oncology study section. He also served as the co-principal investigator of NYU’s Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPORE) grant for skin cancer and melanoma research from the National Cancer Institute. His research has been funded by RO1 grants from the NCI for over 28 years.
Professor Weber published more than 250 articles in the top peer-reviewed journals in his field, and he sat on the scientific advisory boards of seven cancer-related biotechnology companies and numerous cancer institutions and foundations.
To honor the work of Dr. Jeffrey Weber and to learn more about Jeff’s professional life, as well as the personal side of this gracious, witty, and generous man, a memorial editorial paper was published in the Journal For ImmunoTherapy of Cancer from some of his closest colleagues. Read the memorial here.
Transcript
What advice might you give to your younger self?
Jeffrey Weber: There are a number of things that come to mind when I think about how I would advise my younger self. Obviously, with time there comes some wisdom, and I would say first, on the trivial behavioral level, it’s never ever ever ever blow your cool. I think that’s extraordinarily important for a physician, but it’s important for anyone.
The next thing is I think that I, and certainly anyone in the field, should be more aware of the sacrifices that your family makes when you pursue an aggressive career. I’m lucky in that my wife came from a military family. Her father was away a lot. He was in the Navy. So, she was kind of used to the absences, but I think we have to be much more aware, and I certainly should have been much more aware of the sacrifices that my family made—my children and my wife, obviously—to deal with the difficulties of having a father and a husband who pursued an aggressive academic medical career.
And the final piece of advice is I would advise my younger self to pay more attention to the literature and to be more versed in the science. As you know, the literature of science and medicine has exploded in the last 30 years or 40 years since I’ve been in the field. And just keeping up is just much more difficult, and I think we have to be aware that it’s unbelievably important to be up on the literature of science and medicine.
What were the key turning points in your career?
JW: I would think the key turning points for me relate to meeting different mentors. I mean, it really emphasizes the importance of a mentor, or as we say colloquially, having a rabbi. Not in a religious sense, but in a professional sense, in your professional life. For me, the turning points were getting interested in biology and medicine when I was a college student by meeting a guy named Jim Darnell and a guy named Cy Leventhal.
Leventhal, I believe, has passed away, but Jim Darnell was my thesis advisor as a graduate student, still with us at the age of 93. Really impressive individual, Lasker Award winner. So, encountering him, attending a course, and then going on, working in his lab, and then having him as my thesis advisor when I was a graduate student, that was a huge turning point.
The other turning point probably relates to time as a fellow when I was at the NCI and meeting Steve Rosenberg and then working in his lab. So, again, it relates to what kind of mentors have you encountered in your career? And the experience of working with Rosenberg, both clinically and then scientifically, was huge.
And I think it really directed me to want to go into the field of melanoma research, immunotherapy, et cetera. And it sort of set the tone for what I would think was a real role model. And then finally, I think going to a supportive work environment when I went to the University of Southern California, again, another great mentor, Peter Jones, who was then the head of the cancer center, a distinguished scientist being in a supportive environment where I could develop, I think was extraordinarily important for my career and for me personally.
You know, compared to 20, 30, 40 years ago, succeeding as either a basic scientist, a PhD or an MD, or succeeding as a physician-scientist as an MD or an MD-PhD, it’s so much more difficult. And I think it’s become evident to many of the funding agencies, such as SITC, that you have to have something like the Forward Fund.
You have to have something to support junior faculty, because previously, it was, you know, you had R01 funding, you had American Cancer Society funding, and you didn’t have much else. You didn’t have foundations. You didn’t have things like the Forward Fund, and the junior people were kind of left on their own. It was, you know, you dive in the deep end and you sink or swim.
I think today it’s become much more obvious that you have to nurture these people along. It’s so much more difficult today to make a career as a physician-scientist or a basic scientist in translational areas. It’s just so much more important now to be putting effort and resources into promoting the careers of the junior faculty.
One thing that I’ve spent some time doing here is I, we wrote a grant to the NCI called the K12, which is a mentoring junior faculty grant. And I think it’s that sort of effort that needs to be put forward so much more today than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago, to keep this field moving along. Otherwise, we’ll eat our young and the field will die. But I think it’s so important to promote junior faculty.
What does receiving this award mean to you?
JW: Being named a Fellow of the Academy of Immuno-Oncology to me means a lot because in my personal opinion, all through my life, the most important thing professionally to me has been the respect and the views of my colleagues. To me, that’s infinitely more important than your rank, your salary, your tenure, your—you know, any of the honors that we have as academics.
It’s really the respect of the people you work with and your work under that counts for me, and being a Fellow of the Academy of Immuno-Oncology means I’ve earned the respect of my peers and my colleagues, and that means a huge amount to me—more than almost any other honor that I could receive.
