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AACR IO 2026 — Keynotes

Seven keynotes across four sessions at AACR IO 2026. Titles are as published in the archived program; two were never published at all.

Speaker Affiliation Slot
Elizabeth M. Jaffee Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins Wed 6:15 p.m. — Keynote 1
Philip D. Greenberg Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center / University of Washington Wed 6:55 p.m. — Keynote 1
Rafi Ahmed Emory University Thu 8:35 a.m. — Keynote 2
Dario A. Vignali University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine Fri 8:05 a.m. — Keynote 3
Lieping Chen Yale University Fri 8:45 a.m. — Keynote 3
Fred Ramsdell Sonoma Biotherapeutics Sat 8:05 a.m. — Keynote 4
Alexander Marson UCSF Sat 11:05 a.m. — Closing keynote

Elizabeth Jaffee

"The Cancer Vaccine Era Has Arrived" · MD, FAACR · introduced by Nina Bhardwaj

The opening keynote, and a declarative one. Jaffee is also an incoming co-Editor-in-Chief of Cancer Immunology Research — the journal that publishes this meeting's abstract supplement — and joins Bhardwaj and Ribas as a chair of AACR IO 2027. Reading the opening keynote and the succession together, this talk is best understood as the meeting's thesis statement rather than one talk among seven.

Corpus fit: the neoantigen-vaccine thread, 17 abstracts strong — see Themes.

Philip Greenberg

"Taking T Cells Where Natural Evolution Hasn't: Sustained Function in the Tumor Microenvironment" · MD, FAACR · introduced by Antoni Ribas

The engineering counterpart to Jaffee's biology. The framing — that the goal is function sustained in a hostile microenvironment, not merely T cells that recognize tumor — is the through-line connecting the cell-therapy symposia (MS1, MS5, MS6, MS7) to the suppressive-myeloid and metabolism sessions.

Rafi Ahmed

PhD, FAACR · introduced by Nina Bhardwaj

Title never published in any archived program. Ahmed also sat on the Scientific Committee. Given his work on T-cell exhaustion and memory, the likely subject is that program — but we are not asserting a title we could not source.

Dario Vignali

"LAG-3: The third checkpoint inhibitor and its synergistic interactions with PD1" · PhD

The checkpoint-biology keynote, on the checkpoint that took longest to reach the clinic. With 49 abstracts touching checkpoint biology and resistance, this is the meeting's largest theme, and Vignali's talk plus Chen's immediately after form its spine.

Lieping Chen

"Immunology of poorly-immunogenic tumor" · MD, PhD, FAACR

The other half of Friday's keynote block, and the harder question: what to do about tumors that never engage the immune system in the first place. Chen also sat on the Scientific Committee.

Fred Ramsdell

"The bomb to a therapy" · PhD · Sonoma Biotherapeutics, Seattle · 2025 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine · introduced by Philip Greenberg

This title is probably truncated

It reads literally as "The bomb to a therapy" on AACR's page. That is almost certainly a truncation — plausibly of something like "From the scurfy bomb to a therapy," given Ramsdell's foundational work on the scurfy mouse and FOXP3. Do not cite it as complete.

The most unusual keynote at the meeting: a Nobel laureate presenting autoimmunity data at a cancer conference. Per AACR's February 26 blog post, Ramsdell presented Sonoma Biotherapeutics' CAR-Treg targeting citrullinated proteins in rheumatoid arthritis:

  • Phase I, 9 patients, all women with severe refractory RA who had failed TNF inhibitors, JAK inhibitors, rituximab, and abatacept
  • No adverse events reported
  • Swollen and tender joint counts declined in most patients
  • Synovial inflammation reduced by week four

Why it belongs at an IO meeting: Tregs are the dual-edged cell of cancer immunology — the thing IO spends its effort suppressing. A therapy that deliberately expands and directs them, and works, is the strongest available demonstration that the field understands the biology well enough to steer it in either direction.

Alexander Marson

MD, PhD · UCSF · closing keynote

Title never published. Marson also sat on the Scientific Committee. His group works on CRISPR-based engineering of primary human immune cells — which places the closing keynote squarely on the same axis as MS7 ("In vivo T Cell Engineering – Are We There Yet?") from the previous afternoon.

What the keynote slate says about the meeting

The arc is deliberate: vaccines (Jaffee) → engineered T cells (Greenberg) → exhaustion and memory (Ahmed) → checkpoints (Vignali, Chen) → Tregs turned to a different purpose (Ramsdell) → genome engineering of immune cells (Marson). Two of the seven are company-affiliated or company-founded, and the Nobel slot went to a talk about a non-cancer indication. For a conference in its second year trying to establish a distinct identity next to the AACR Annual Meeting and SITC, that programming reads as a claim to the engineering end of immunology rather than the trial-readout end.

Sources