Prof David H. Raulet

Professor Raulet is a tumor and viral immunologist who holds the Esther and Wendy Schekman Chair in Cancer Biology at UC Berkeley, and directs Berkeley’s Immunotherapeutics and Vaccine Research Initiative. He made fundamental contributions to understanding the specificity and function and molecular activation of innate lymphocytes and T cells. His efforts focus on mechanisms of tumor immunosurveillance and approaches for immunotherapy of cancer and mechanisms of viral recognition. His group elucidated mechanisms leading to NK cell activation in tumors, and roles for inhibitory and activating receptors on NK cells and T cells in tumor recognition, including NKG2D, its ligands and others. He discovered mechanisms that inhibit, desensitize or inactivate NK cells in the tumor environment, which represent potential targets for cancer immunotherapy. His lab probed how innate pathways such as the cGAS-STING pathway provoke antitumor immunity. He has developed protocols to mobilize NK cells for therapy of cancers that are resistant to T cell recognition. He previously made fundamental contributions to our understanding the specificity of the T cell antigen receptor, TCR genes, and T cell development in the thymus. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a recipient of the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor Immunology, a Fellow of the AAAS and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Association of Immunologists. He has authored more than 225 papers.