Scientific Advisory Board

Chair - Marcel R M van den Brink

Head, Division of Hematologic Malignancies, MSK, New York

Dr. van den Brink is internationally renowned for his work in the field of bone marrow transplantation, the gut microbiome, and immunotherapy at New York’s MSK, where he is Head of the Division of Hematologic Malignancies. He is also a professor of Medicine and Immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College and holds a joint appointment in the Immunology and Transplantation Program of the Sloan Kettering Institute. At MSK, the van den Brink lab studies novel strategies to improve immune therapies for cancer patients with a special emphasis on the role of the intestinal microbiome in (patho)physiology and therapy, Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell therapy, and regeneration of thymic function to improve T-cell immunity. Dr. van den Brink is Co-Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at MSK and Medical Council Chairman for DKMS, an international nonprofit organization devoted to bone marrow donor registration. He has received prestigious prizes and honors including the 2022 E. Donnall Thomas Award from the American Society for Transplantation and Cellular Therapy (ASTCT).

Georg Höllander

Head of the Department of Paediatrics and Action Research Professor of Paediatrics at the University of Oxford, and Director of the Botnar Research Centre for Child Health at the ETH Zurich and University of Basel

Georg Holländer, MA (Oxon), MD, FMedSci, FRCPCH, FMH Paediatrics (CH), is an internationally recognized expert in developmental immunology with a specific interest in thymic biology. His research group at Oxford University has developed unique mouse models to understand the development and function of the thymus and explore ways to control it. A pediatrician and an immunologist by training, Georg Holländer is a professor in several prestigious universities: the University of Basel and the ETH Zurich in Switzerland, and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Prof. Holländer is also the director of the Botnar Research Center for Child Health in Basel.

Jerome Ritz

Executive Director, Connell and O’Reilly Families Cell Manipulation Core Facility, Professor of Medicine, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital,Harvard Medical School

Jerome Ritz, MD, is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a leading specialist in graft versus leukemia (GVL), graft versus host disease (GVHD), bone marrow transplantation, immuno-oncology and cell manufacturing. Dr. Ritz’s research lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has revealed mechanisms of GVL and demonstrated the key role of Treg in chronic GVHD after hematopoietic stem celltransplantation. Dr. Ritz is also the Executive Director of the Cell Manipulation Core Facility at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. This academic GMP cell manufacturing facility provides a variety of cellular products including CAR T-cells, NK cells, genetically modified hematopoietic stem cells and regulatory T-cells for adult and pediatric patients enrolled on early phase clinical trials.