Alumni & Giving

Grateful for the lifesaving care he received at UT Southwestern, Jere Thompson Jr. asked his oncologist, Robert Collins, M.D., how he could help him make an impact on the future of cancer care. The result is the creation of the new Center for Cellular Therapies and Cancer Immunology at UT Southwestern.

In 2020, Mr. Thompson contracted a severe case of COVID-19. While it took several months to regain his strength, his daily walks gradually grew longer, and he was able to begin swimming outdoors again as temperatures warmed. But when Mr. Thompson began wheezing after relatively short distances in the pool, he knew something wasn't right. He had heard about long COVID and thought that might be the problem. His wife, Carolyn, encouraged Mr. Thompson to visit a doctor at UT Southwestern.

To their shock, Mr. Thompson's red blood cell counts were unusually low, and subsequent testing detected acute myeloid leukemia or AML, where bone marrow makes a large number of abnormal blood cells that crowd out the good cells. It's a type of cancer that can get worse quickly, so doctors at UT Southwestern's Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center decided to treat Mr. Thompson rapidly – and aggressively.

"It was Labor Day weekend," Mr. Thompson recalled. "That was my first overnight stay in a hospital since the day I was born. I was surprised, and my family was terrified. I ended up staying for 32 nights."

After receiving chemotherapy and a molecular-targeted therapy at William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital, he was sent home for a few days. "The plan was to begin the process for a bone marrow transplant the following month," Mr. Thompson said. "Then Carolyn and I received news that the latest biopsy showed the cancer was gone."

After four additional rounds of chemotherapy to ensure the cancer was completely eradicated, Mr. Thompson officially began living cancer-free. "I feel very blessed," he said. "I am a lucky beneficiary of incredible advances that have been made in medicine and technology."

Now, with Mr. Thompson's support, a new center opening within the Simmons Cancer Center at UT Southwestern is taking the next leap in combating cancer by using reengineered immune cells to target and annihilate cancer cells with unprecedented precision. It's a mission that resonates deeply with him, especially after his personal experience with AML – so much so that he and his wife made the initial gift to advance the fight against cancer and support the latest in molecular innovations on the horizon at UT Southwestern.

Lasting legacy

Mr. Thompson grew up in Dallas. His family started the convenience store industry from an icehouse in Oak Cliff and launched a national franchise with its 7-Eleven stores. His father and uncles took the stores worldwide and introduced a sweet, icy concoction that made everyone "slurp" loudly to get the slushy dregs of each Slurpee cup.

"I remember my dad taking all of us in our station wagon over to the first store selling Slurpees," Mr. Thompson said. "There were two options, cola and cherry, and we loved them both."

He started working in his family's convenience stores at age 7, inheriting an entrepreneurial spirit. For college he moved to California, where he earned an economics degree from Stanford University, then returned to Texas and earned his M.B.A. from The University of Texas at Austin. Later as the co-founder and CEO of Ambit Energy, he linked electricity and natural gas to more than 1.2 million customers across North America and Japan.

Long active as a leader in the community, Mr. Thompson currently chairs the boards of both Southwestern Medical Foundation and the Hoblitzelle Foundation. He also serves on the boards of the O'Donnell Foundation and Cistercian Preparatory School, and he previously chaired the Dallas Citizens Council, the North Texas Tollway Authority, and the Texas Turnpike Authority.

Mr. Thompson is still building, with his focus now on the new Center for Cellular Therapies and Cancer Immunology at UT Southwestern. Through his support, and that of the O'Donnell Foundation and other major donors, the Center recently launched. It represents the future of cancer therapies that supercharge the body's immune system to eradicate cancer cells.

"Cellular therapies offer hope to many patients who face limited options after traditional treatments fail," Mr. Thompson said. "One day they could replace chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants as the primary therapy for cancers."

To lead this new effort, UT Southwestern conducted a national search.

Thinking big

To helm the new Center, UT Southwestern recruited Jaehyuk Choi, M.D., Ph.D., from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. A specialist in dermatology, biochemistry, and molecular genetics, Dr. Choi focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying T-cell dysfunction in immune-related diseases, such as cancer.

Dr. Choi, who joined UT Southwestern in April, has brought a monumental vision to the new Center.

"Our goal is to try to cure cancer, period," Dr. Choi said. "That may sound like science fiction, but I believe we're more likely to achieve the impossible if we think boldly, bravely, and audaciously about the problem."

According to Dr. Choi, tackling such a vexing problem as cancer requires a new way of thinking.

"Every discipline in science starts off as almost purely theoretical, and at some point, it becomes an engineering problem," Dr. Choi said. "With cancer, we're humble enough to realize we don't know enough to engineer a solution on base principles. So we're looking to nature for inspiration. It's similar to how people who envisioned the first airplane thought of wings by looking at birds and using a concept that nature had already mastered through elegant design. In nature, there are some 'super' T-cells, or superimmune cells, that exist, and our goal is to really understand why those are super cells, and then if we can adapt that to cell therapies, we'll make tremendous progress against cancer."

Dr. Choi's arrival has been heralded as a significant development for the work of the Simmons Cancer Center.

"Dr. Choi has already done groundbreaking work in this area, paving the way for transformative cancer treatments using CAR-T cells. We are confident that his past work foreshadows more advances to come that will extend the breadth of application and effectiveness of cell therapy," said Daniel K. Podolsky, M.D., President of UT Southwestern.

Whatʼs in a CAR-T cell?

Each CAR on an individual T cell spans the cell membrane, with part of the receptor sitting outside the cell and part within the cell.

The external part of the CAR is composed of fragments, or domains, of lab-made antibodies. Which domains are used affects the receptor’s ability to recognize or bind to its target antigen on tumor cells.

The internal part of each CAR has “signaling” and “co‑stimulatory” domains. After the receptor binds to an antigen on a tumor cell, these domains transmit signals inside the T cells that help them multiply further in the body.

Credit: National Cancer Institute

As the new Center Director, Dr. Choi will identify new lead candidates for cell therapies developed at UT Southwestern, providing the basis for first-in-human clinical trials combating solid tumors.

Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy (CAR-T) has had great success in treating blood and bone marrow cancers but not solid tumors, which comprise 90% of cancers. The defenses that solid tumors put in place exhaust CAR-T cells so that they are not able to attack these cancers effectively.

"The innovative approaches discovered by Dr. Choi to engineer CAR-T cells in a way that can recognize and kill cancer cells in solid tumors are bound to be highly impactful and help many patients with no curative options," said Carlos L. Arteaga, M.D., Director of the Simmons Cancer Center, who with the Chair of Dermatology, Joseph Merola, M.D., M.M.Sc., led the recruitment of Dr. Choi. The Center will coalesce basic scientists, biomedical engineers, computational scientists, bioinformaticians, physician-scientists, and clinical oncologists, all striving for the discovery of new cancer targets and first-in-human clinical trials.

By developing collaborative initiatives between laboratory-based researchers and clinical investigators at the Simmons Cancer Center, Dr. Choi aims to make CAR-T cells 100 times stronger at fighting tumors, including melanoma, pancreas, lung, and stomach tumors in humans, as his laboratory group at Northwestern recently did in mice.

Standing tall

Building on the pioneering work of the existing UT Southwestern Hematologic Malignancies and Cellular Therapy Program at the Simmons Cancer Center, the Center for Cellular Therapies and Cancer Immunology is poised to extend its reach by advancing novel CAR-T cell therapies that involve removing some of a patient's T cells and reengineering them to specifically attack that patient's cancer, then returning them to the patient.

Robert Collins, M.D., Professor of Internal Medicine and a blood cancer specialist, has led the Hematologic Malignancies and Cellular Therapy Program since establishing it in 1998. Today, its bone marrow transplant program is widely recognized as one of the best in the country, caring for more than 1,800 new patients a year and performing approximately 190 transplants annually. These patients are among the sickest cancer patients, and their care is exceptionally complex.

Robert Collins, M.D.

Carlos L. Arteaga, M.D.

Joseph Merola, M.D., M.M.Sc.

The new Center will build upon this work by implementing advanced research laboratories equipped with the latest technology for molecular and cell biology research. New labs will drive innovations in therapy development, particularly for difficult to treat solid tumors. A new facility will also produce cell therapies on-site, ensuring high standards of safety and efficiency in therapy development and delivery.

"And importantly, funding will enable scientists to move forward with new clinical therapies," Dr. Choi said. "My goal is to leverage the scientific expertise at UT Southwestern to bring these therapies to patients in Dallas. Ultimately, we aim to scale these treatments by collaborating with the local biotech community in order to reverse or prevent cancer worldwide."

Dr. Collins, who largely contributed to the groundwork for molecular-targeted therapies at UT Southwestern and helped recruit Dr. Choi, shares this view.

"Chemotherapies are still a preferred treatment for some cancers; however, molecularly targeted therapies and cellular therapies are quickly leaving them behind," Dr. Collins said. "This is exciting because as more molecular therapies, cellular immunotherapies, and stem cell therapies come online, the easier and less toxic these treatments will be for the patient. The work of the Center will revolve around engineering treatments that will eventually be somewhat off-the-shelf: say somebody comes in, they have X kind of cancer, and we reengineer the person's immune cells to attack the cancer."

In recent years, Dr. Collins was the lead researcher at UT Southwestern for a multicenter study of the genomics of more than 600 individual cases of AML, which revealed numerous insights into the biology of that particular blood cancer. That study was followed by a large clinical trial called Beat AML, which tested different targeted therapies matched to the specific genetic makeup of each patient's cancer - an approach known as a "basket trial."

“Our goal is to try to cure cancer, period.”

"Our inspiration was seeing the excitement of my doctor, Dr. Collins, about treating cancer patients in the future with highly personalized cellular therapies," Mr. Thompson said. "And now with the arrival of Dr. Choi and his talented team, this future will be happening here in Dallas at UT Southwestern."

Rapid treatments for a diverse array of cancers offer a tantalizing possibility for future generations, researchers say. While developing new cancer treatments is considerably more complicated, treatments that run the gamut of idiosyncrasies in cancer may not be far behind.

"We have increasingly sophisticated ways to engineer immune cells to behave in a bespoke way, suited to the individual's cancer," Dr. Choi said. "Our ultimate goal is to develop a long-term cure for cancer, and while the scientist in me is slightly nervous to say it, that's our goal – to cure cancer, period."

Find out how you can support the Center for Cellular Therapies and Cancer Immunology by contacting Michele Myers.

• Dr. Arteaga holds the Annette Simmons Distinguished University Chair in Breast Cancer Research.
• Dr. Choi holds the Scheryle Simmons Patigian Distinguished Chair in Cancer Immunobiology.
• Dr. Collins holds the Sydney and J.L. Huffines Distinguished Chair in Cancer Research in Honor of Eugene Frenkel, M.D., and the H. Lloyd and Willye V. Skaggs Professorship in Medical Research.
• Dr. Merola holds the Mary Kay Inc. Distinguished Chair in Dermatology.
• Dr. Podolsky holds the Philip O'Bryan Montgomery, Jr., M.D. Distinguished Presidential Chair in Academic Administration and the Charles Cameron Sprague Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science.