Michel Sadelain

Michel Sadelain is an immunologist and genetic engineer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York, where he holds the Steve and Barbara Friedman Chair. He is the founding director of the Center for Cell Engineering and the head of the Gene Transfer and Gene Expression Laboratory. He is a member of the department of medicine at Memorial Hospital and of the immunology program at the Sloan Kettering Institute. He is best known for his major contributions to T cell engineering and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy, an immunotherapy based on the genetic engineering of a patient's own T cells to treat cancer. Sadelain was born in France, where he earned his MD at the University of Paris, France, in 1984. After obtaining his PhD in immunology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, in 1989, he trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While at MIT, Sadelain began his research on genetic engineering. In 1994, Sadelain joined Memorial Sloan Kettering as an assistant member in the Sloan Kettering Institute, where he established programs on human hematopoietic stem cell and T cell engineering. In 2008, he founded the Center for Cell Engineering at Memorial Sloan Kettering. He is a past president of the American Society of Cell and Gene Therapy (2014–2015) and previously served on its board of directors from 2004 to 2007. He served as a member of the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) of the NIH from 2013 to 2015. Sadelain and his team study gene transfer in hematopoietic stem cells and T cells, the regulation of transgene expression, the biology of chimeric antigen receptors, and therapeutic strategies to enhance immunity against cancer. Sadelain is a recognized leader in the conceptualization and design of synthetic receptors for antigen, which he named chimeric antigen receptors (CARs). T cells can be engineered to express a CAR to acquire the ability to recognize and destroy cancer cells.