Professor
City of Hope National Medical Center
Michael A. Caligiuri, MD, (pronounced KALAJURY) recently completed his five year term as President of the City of Hope National Medical Center in Los Angeles, California where he held the Deana and Steve Campbell Physician-in-Chief Distinguished Chair. He retired from administrative leadership this year and continues in his research laboratory at City of Hope as a professor in the Department of Hematology and Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation.
Dr. Caligiuri is a physician – scientist whose basic and translational work has focused on immunotherapy for both liquid and solid tumors. His laboratory has studied human natural killer (NK) cells for 35 years with over 400 original peer-reviewed publications on NK cells and/or cancer. Pivotal discoveries from the Caligiuri laboratory have made it possible to bring chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) NK cells from the laboratory into the clinic for cancer therapy. These include proprietary retroviral transduction of human NK cells, the elucidation of the site, stages, cytokines and molecular mechanisms involved in the differentiation of human NK cells from CD34(+) hematopoietic stem cells, and the discovery of IL-15 as the key cytokine for human NK cell development, survival, growth, and activation. These three advances have been critical for the genesis of CAR NK cells from peripheral blood, umbilical cord blood and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Most all of this work was accomplished with his trainees as well as his longtime collaborator, Jianhua Yu, PhD.
Dr. Caligiuri has designed and conducted clinical studies modulating NK cells for over 1,000 patients with cancer. Over 120 students have trained in the Caligiuri laboratory and have received over 220 local, state, national or international awards for their research. In 2022 Dr. Caligiuri received the Basic Science Mentor Award from the American Society of Hematology.
Published Work: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=caligiuri+ma
Cellular Therapy for Solid Tumors: Current Status and Future Directions
Monday, February 19, 2024
9:00 AM - 9:20 AM AST