Cancer Immunotherapy Pioneer Michel Sadelain Joins Columbia University
Sadelain, a physician-scientist known for breakthrough work on CAR-T therapy, will lead a new cell engineering and therapy initiative at Columbia.
Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, has been named the inaugural director of the Columbia Initiative for Cell Engineering and Therapy (CICET) and director of the Cancer Cell Therapy Initiative in the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
“Today’s announcement underscores Columbia’s determination to transcend disciplinary and departmental boundaries to speed discoveries beneficial to society,” said Katrina Armstrong, MD, interim president of Columbia University, chief executive officer of Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and executive vice president for Health and Biomedical Sciences at Columbia University. “We could not be more committed to the vision that Dr. Sadelain brings to Columbia for the future of cell engineering and therapy and to the transformative impact he will have on this University and the field of medicine.”
Sadelain is a globally recognized pioneer of chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) immunotherapy, a revolutionary approach to cancer treatment. CAR-T therapy uses genetic engineering to transform a sample of a patient’s own T cells in the lab into “living drugs.”
He joins Columbia from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where he led the development of CAR-T cells targeting CD19, a unique marker found in certain blood cancer cells. After conceiving CAR molecules and identifying this target, he and his team established genetic engineering and cell manufacturing capabilities required to translate their research into clinical applications, starting with refractory leukemias in 2007. The first CAR-T therapies were approved by the FDA in 2017, ushering a new class of drugs based on T-cell engineering.
The field of medicine established by Sadelain not only foreshadows a range of therapeutic innovations in biomedical science but is, today, already helping patients who previously lacked effective treatment options for several types of lymphoma, leukemia and multiple myeloma.
In addition to continuing their work on existing CAR-T therapies, Sadelain and his team will collaborate with leading Columbia scientists to advance research on using cell engineering to treat other cancers and other illnesses including blood disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, autoimmune conditions, and transplant-related conditions.
Under Sadelain’s leadership, the Columbia Initiative for Cell Engineering and Therapy will recruit a new cadre of leading scientists, enhance Columbia’s research infrastructure, and integrate trailblazing work conducted across the university in disease modeling, bioengineering, genome editing, systems biology, synthetic biology, machine-learning/AI, and more.
The field of cell therapy is evolving rapidly. There are nearly 2,000 cell and gene therapy clinical trials underway globally and decisions on several proposed cell and gene therapies are pending before U.S. and European regulatory bodies.
“Cell engineering holds great promise for treating and eventually curing a wide array of diseases," said Sadelain. “I look forward to collaborating with the incredibly talented and innovative experts across Columbia to cultivate a groundbreaking hub for interdisciplinary research that can help realize the potential of this promising field and make it broadly accessible to all patients.”
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More about Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD
Sadelain joins Columbia University from Memorial Sloan Kettering, where he was the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Chair in the Immunology Program of the Sloan Kettering Institute and founded the Center for Cell Engineering at MSK. Sadelain completed his MD at the University of Paris; conducted his PhD research at the University of Alberta; and completed postdoctoral work at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In the early 1990s, Sadelain made some of the initial discoveries that made CAR-T therapy possible, publishing his first abstract on T-cell engineering in 1992. Sadelain and his team created the first effective CAR-T cells in 2002, demonstrating that these supercharged T cells could kill cancer cells grown in lab dishes. In 2003, Sadelain’s team showed that CAR-T cells could eradicate leukemia cells in mice.
Sadelain then worked with Isabelle Rivière, PhD, and collaborators to lead the first clinical trials using CAR-T cells to target cancer cells in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia and adult lymphoblastic leukemia. In 2017, the FDA approved the first CAR-T therapy—the first genetically engineered cell therapy of any kind—for some children and young adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common type of pediatric cancer in the United States.
Sadelain has been elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, American Association for Cancer Research, American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy, American Society of Hematology, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine of France.
Sadelain has won the Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences, Canada Gairdner International Award, Warren Alpert Foundation Prize, American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy Outstanding Achievement Award, Leopold Griffuel Award, INSERM International Prize, Jacob and Louise Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine, Passano Laureate, Pasteur Weizmann/Servier Prize at the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and more.
You can find his bio and complete lists of his awards and society memberships and selected publications here.
Read the full announcement from Katrina Armstrong, interim president of Columbia University, here.