Obituary: Joseph Lustgarten, 1963–2011

Abstract

Dr. Joseph Lustgarten, our colleague, mentor, and friend died June 30, 2011 in Scottsdale, Arizona at the age of 48 from gastric cancer. Joseph was born in Bogota, Colombia, and received his BS degree in Bacteriology from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota. He worked as a research assistant in the Department of Immunology at the National Cancer Institute of Colombia and in the Department of Immunogenetics at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute before starting his graduate work at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1986. His MS and Ph.D. projects, under the mentorship of Dr. Zelig Eshhar, focused on redirecting T-cell specificity with antibody-based chimeric receptors. He established a T-cell line expressing an IgE-specific chimeric receptor and demonstrated the ability of this line to eliminate IgEproducing B cells. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1993, he joined Dr. Linda Sherman’s laboratory at the Scripps Research Institute so he could pursue his interests in tumor immunology. As a post-doctoral fellow, Joseph used double transgenic mice expressing HLA-2.1 and human CD8 to identify tumor peptides derived from the oncogenic molecule Her2/neu. He also used his chimeric antibody expertise to redirect and localize cytotoxic CD8 T cells to tumor sites. In 1999, Joseph was appointed an Assistant Professor in the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center in San Diego where he established himself as a productive and well-funded independent investigator focusing his research program on strategies aimed at enhancing anti-tumor immunity and understanding the mechanisms responsible for T-cell tolerance in individuals with cancer. Joseph often pointed out that cancer is predominantly a disease of older people, and he surmised that as an increasing percentage of the population becomes elderly, cancer rates will also increase. This led him to focus on the relationship between aging, cancer, and the immune system, and to the conviction that investigators should be testing cancer therapies and vaccines in old, rather than young, mice. When Joseph moved his research laboratory to the Mayo Clinic in S. Ostrand-Rosenberg (&) University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA e-mail: srosenbe@umbc.edu