The 2013 winner of the Abbott Award in Clinical and Diagnostic Immunology is Jennifer Puck, M.D., University of California, San Francisco, for her research on human primary immunodeficiencies. According to Morton Cowan, University of California Benioff Children's Hospital, “Puck is an international leader in understanding the functioning of the immune system as well as the development and clinical application of immunodiagnostic procedures.”

Puck graduated with her MD from Harvard Medical School. Following graduation she was a Pediatric Resident and Fellow in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Washington University, St. Louis. She completed her training in Pediatric Infectious Diseases, Microbiology, and Immunology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. After tenured faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia she became Chief of the Genetics and Molecular Biology Branch of the intramural NIH Human Genome Research Institute. There she applied genome science to human immune disorders in her basic and translational research program, which has since moved to UCSF. Currently, Puck is Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Allergy, Immunology and Blood and Bone Marrow Transplantation at UCSF. She is also Medical Director of the Pediatric Clinical Research Center within the UCSF Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute and a member of the UCSF Institute for Human Genetics.

Over the past 15 years, Puck has pursued a ground-breaking clinical research program to develop newborn screening for severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). She came to the conclusion that whether treatment involved transplantation, enzyme replacement for ADA deficient SCID, or gene therapy, one must identify and treat these infants before they became ill and, therefore, newborn screening was a necessity. According to Luigi Notarangelo, Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, “her most significant contribution has been to pioneer and master determination of T cell receptor excision circles (TRECs) as a novel and powerful assay to to screen infants for SCID at birth. She has shown the efficacy of this method that can identify genetically affected babies who appear otherwise healthy before they develop life-threatening infections. This assay is now used for universal newborn screening by several states in the USA. Through prompt referral to hematopoietic cell transplantation, more than 95% of SCID babies can now be cured.”

Currently, Puck is engaged in multicenter studies to determine optimal SCID treatment strategies, particularly for treating very small infants diagnosed by newborn screening in whom the risks versus benefits of transplant associated chemotherapy have not been well studied. In addition to her research and public policy work, Puck has also been active in the educational arena. She has mentored trainees at all levels and given many educational sessions about primary immunodeficiencies at national professional meetings of immunologists and allergists, geneticists, and infectious diseases specialists. She is also a co-editor, along with C. I. Edvard Smith and Hans Ochs, of the premier textbook of primary immunodeficiency.

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