With kind support from the Medawar family, the Oxford Immunology Network has established a Peter Medawar Prize for Immunology. This prize is awarded annually to recognise an Oxford researcher who has made an outstanding contribution to immunology, both through their scientific excellence and through their broader contributions to the academic community.
The 2025 prize was awarded to Sooraj Achar (NCI/Kennedy Institute) for his outstanding contribution to understanding T cell antigen recognition, particularly in the context of cancer immunotherapy. To accurately recognize foreign pathogens, including tumor cells, immune cells need to distinguish between self and nonself proteins, which can often be presented simultaneously to T cells. In an article in Science, Mr Achar, together with Dr Francois Bourassa and Dr Thomas Rademaker, developed a high throughput robotic platform named the IMMUNOtron to examine the output of T cell antigen exposure at a large scale. Then in a recently published article in Cell, together with Dr Francois Bourassa and Dr Taisuke Kondo, Mr Achar used this platform to improve a form of immunotherapy called CAR T cells, where a cancer patient’s own T cells are modified to express a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) that targets a tumor protein. The researchers were able to use the IMMUNOtron to examine the output of hundreds of combinations of TCR and CAR stimulation, allowing them to demonstrate for the first time that weak TCR signals inhibit (antagonize) CAR T activation. They then utilized this discovery to create a new type of CAR T cell called an Antagonism Enforced Braking System (AEBS) CAR T cell that harnesses TCR/CAR antagonism to improve CAR T cell specificity against tumor cells over healthy tissue cells. This advance may help expand the pool of tumor types, and therefore patients, CAR T cell immunotherapy can be safely used for.
Mr Achar has also contributed to the immunology community in several ways through research collaborations with other groups and contributions to seminars.