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The Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer 2020 Richard V. Smalley, MD, Memorial Award and Lectureship was awarded to Lieping Chen, MD, PhD; Gordon Freeman, PhD; and Arlene Sharpe, MD, PhD, to honor their groundbreaking contributions to the development of immune checkpoint inhibitors.

Chen is a professor at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, CT, and co-director of Yale Cancer Center's immunology program. He was involved in discovering the B7-H1 molecule, now called PD-L1, and showing that it is expressed in multiple tumor types and inhibits T-cell activity. He later helped organize the first clinical trial of an anti–PD-1 therapy in cancer. His lab also developed an antibody against the 4-1BB costimulatory pathway.

Freeman is a medical oncologist at Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center and a professor at Harvard Medical School (HMS), both in Boston, MA. He helped to identify the PD-1–PD-L1 and B72–CTLA4 pathways and demonstrate that blocking PD-1 enhances immune response. He also aided in discovering PD-L1 and PD-L2 and determining that they are ligands for PD-1. His research helped establish that PD-L1 is expressed in solid tumors.

Sharpe is a researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT andHarvard in Cambridge, MA, leader of the Cancer Immunology Program at Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, and co-director of the Evergrande Center for Immunologic Diseases at HMS and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Her lab elucidated the functions of the T-cell costimulatory pathways CTLA4 and PD-1. She studies how these pathways regulate T-cell tolerance and antimicrobial and antitumor immunity.

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