Keynote Speaker

John (Jack) Shively, Ph.D.

Professor & Associate Director for the Center for Theranostics 

John Shively received his PhD in Biochemistry in 1975 from the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL. Immediately after, he began his postdoctoral work at the City of Hope in Immunology. One of his first projects was the development of monoclonal antibodies to the cancer antigen CEA that led to their use in a CEA assay by Roche. One of the monoclonal antibodies was converted to a chimeric mouse/human format, produced in a GMP facility here at City of Hope, and when radiolabeled with the gamma emitter In-111, was used to diagnosis CEA positive tumors, and when labeled with the beta-emitter Y-90 used for therapy in over 300 patients at City of Hope. In addition, the heavy and light chains of one the monoclonal antibodies was cloned and expressed in E. coli by Cabilly and Riggs in 1984 as one of the first examples of the production of a recombinant antibody. More recently, a humanized version of one of the antibodies has been labeled with the positron emitter Cu-64 for PET imaging in colorectal cancer, and an alpha-emitter Ac-225 for therapy of CEA positive malignancies.

As part of his studies to sequence the CEA protein and clone its gene, he built his own protein sequencers and help establish the mass spectrometry facility at City of Hope, that together with microsequence analysis, were used to obtain amino acid sequences used to clone genes by the technique of reverse genetics. In 1990 he helped establish the Protein Society that is still active to this date. For his work on CEA he was awarded the Abbott prize for oncological research in 1999. This work led to the discovery of multiple genes in the CEA gene family, one of which, CEACAM1, has been a major focus of his research to the present day. Functions of CEACAM1 include regulation of T and B cells activation and IL-2 in the immune system, regulation of angiogenesis, regulation of toll like receptor-4 and the inflammasome in inflammation, and lumen formation in the mammary gland. He helped show that the multiple functions of CEACAM1 were due to regulation of exon splicing that resulted into different signaling domains, one containing ITIMs and a beta-catenin binding motif, and one containing an actin binding motif that was regulated by calmodulin, CaMK2 and annexin A2. Currently, he has shown a role for CEACAM1 in lipid storage and inflammation in the liver, making CEACAM1 a major player in preventing fatty liver disease.

Over thirty years ago, he was instrumental in organizing the City of Hope Graduate program and served as an Associate Dean from 10/94-10/21. He graduated over 20 students, including the first graduate Michael Lewis who graduated in 1997 and was present at this year’s commencement ceremony celebrating 30 years of the program. In other administrative duties, he was the Chair of the Department of Immunology from10/86 to 10/18 and Co-Director of the Center for Theranostics from 10/16-10/18, and currently serves as its associate director. He served on the Medical School Admissions Committee for UC Riverside from 2011-2018 and taught in their premed program. He has served on multiple NCI panels, including the biomarkers panel from 2006-2010. He has over 400 publications and remains active in both research and teaching.