Which Philadelphians might get a Nobel this year?

It’s that time of year again: when pumpkin lattes are back, the leaves turn crisp and crimson, and … predictions for which local researchers might win this year’s Nobel Prizes start pouring in.

So who are the contenders?

One name you might hear is Carl June, the pioneer of a genetic engineering technique known as CAR-T that has revolutionized the treatment of certain blood cancers. The first child treated with CAR-T at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 2012 — a 6-year-old with terminal cancer named Emily Whitehead — recently enrolled at Penn as an undergraduate student.

Versions of the CAR-T technique June developed have since treated more than 20,000 patients with otherwise deadly blood cancers, with success rates ranging from 50% to 90%.

Last year, June — a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also directs a center and institute dedicated to immunotherapy — split the $3 million Breakthrough Prize (dubbed the “Oscars of science”) for his work with CAR-T.

Another Penn researcher — and past Breakthrough Prize winner — on some predictors’ short list for this year’s Nobel is Virginia Man-Yee Lee, a professor of Alzheimer’s research and director of Penn’s Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research. She won the Breakthrough Prize in 2019 for her work with brain diseases marked by abnormal, “misfolded” proteins, such as Alzheimer’s, ALS, and Parkinson’s.

Yes, both names are affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, and that’s not a coincidence. The institution is a juggernaut of research and medicine; according to a Penn spokesperson, 11 of the previous winners of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine have ties to the university. (There are also 29 Nobel laureates currently affiliated with the institution.)

Last year’s winners, in fact, were Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, both from Penn, who discovered the technology underlying the first COVID-19 vaccines. Experts credit their work for helping avoid millions of hospitalizations and deaths.

Even some local contenders for the Nobel Prize in physics have ties to Penn: Charles Kane and Eugene Mele, both professors of physics at the school, shared the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018 for their work predicting the existence of a wafer-thin material that could be used in future generations of fast computers.

But the Breakthrough Prize isn’t the only metric to use when predicting future Nobel laureates.

Clarivate Analytics, a Philadelphia-based company that tracks metrics about research papers, among other products, recently listed the researchers in various fields who they consider “of Nobel class,” based on a variety of metrics, such as producing research that is frequently referenced by other scientists. Clarivate’s lists of “Citation Laureates” have successfully predicted 75 future Nobel laureates.

This year’s list includes no one from Philadelphia, but there are two professors from Princeton: Janet Currie, a professor of economics who studies child development, and Roberto Car, a professor of chemistry who, together with another researcher, developed a method for calculating atomic movements that has proven essential for material science. Car shared the 2020 Ben Franklin Medal in Chemistry from the Franklin Institute.

But, as always, it’s anyone’s guess. Tune in the early hours of Monday, Oct. 7 — the day the Nobel for physiology or medicine is announced — to find out the first of this year’s winners.