Scientific Advisory Board

 Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD

Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, is the Director of the Center for Cell Engineering and the incumbent of the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Chair at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He is a Member of the Immunology Program and the Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics.

Dr. Sadelain’s research focuses on human cell engineering and cell therapy to treat cancer and hereditary blood disorders. His laboratory has made several seminal contributions to the field of chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), from their conceptualization and optimization to their clinical translation for cancer immunotherapy. His group was the first to publish dramatic molecular remissions in patients with chemorefractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia following treatment with autologous CD19-targeted T cells.

Dr. Sadelain is the recipient of the Cancer Research Institute’s Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor Immunology, the Sultan Bin Khalifa International Award for Innovative Medical Research on Thalassemia, the NYPLA Inventor of the Year award, the Passano award, the Pasteur-Weizmann award, the Gabbay award, the INSERM International Prize Laureate, the Laureate of the 48^th Foundation ARC Léopold Griffuel and most recently the Outstanding Achievement Award from the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy. He previously served on the NIH Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee and as President of the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy.

  Mark Fleming, MD, DPhil

Dr. Fleming is a hematological pathologist, the S. Burt Wolbach Professor of Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and Chairman of Pathology at Children's Hospital Boston. He graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in Molecular Biology, and was awarded a Marshall Scholarship to study organic chemistry at the university of Oxford and was awarded a D.Phil. Thereafter, he undertook an M.D. degree at the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Division of Harvard Medical School and completed a residency in Anatomic Pathology and a fellowship in Hematopathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital as well as a research fellowship in the Division of Hematology at Boston Children’s Hospital.   He has worked in the field of iron metabolism for more than 30 years.  His major research interest is in iron and hematology, using genetics to discover and explore the function of novel proteins involved in the pathways that lead to iron utilization and hemoglobin production in red blood cells.  He and members of his laboratory have been involved in a number of important discoveries, including the description of the iron transporter DMT1/SLC11A2, the identification of the endosomal ferrireductase STEAP3, the detection of mutations in TMPRSS6 in individuals with iron refractory iron deficiency anemia (IRIDA), as well as the cloning, and characterization of several genes responsible for rare forms of sideroblastic anemia. A second focus of his laboratory and his primary clinical interest is the pathology, pathophysiology and genetics of inherited and acquired bone marrow failure disorders and the pediatric myelodysplastic syndromes.  In addition to his academic work, Dr. Fleming has a 20-year history of working as a consultant to pharma, both in his areas of research expertise, as well as slide-based assays for drug target discovery and validation and pre- and post-clinical response assessment.