Steven A. Rosenberg

Steven A. Rosenberg, MD, PhD is Chief of the Surgery Branch at the NCI Center for Cancer Research and an NIH Distinguished Investigator. He is universally recognized as the founder of cancer immunotherapy as a clinical discipline and the pioneer of adoptive T cell transfer (ACT) using tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs). Beginning in the late 1980s, Dr. Rosenberg's Surgery Branch at NCI conducted the first successful clinical trials demonstrating that TILs — T cells isolated from excised tumors, expanded ex vivo to massive numbers, and reinfused after lymphodepleting chemotherapy — could induce complete durable remissions in patients with metastatic melanoma, including in patients who had failed all prior therapy. His development of the lymphodepletion-plus-IL-2 conditioning regimen was essential to achieving durable T cell engraftment and antitumor responses. His 2002 Science paper reporting 6 of 13 metastatic melanoma patients achieving objective responses including two complete remissions with ACT is considered a landmark. Dr. Rosenberg's laboratory has also pioneered TCR-engineered T cell therapy — genetically modifying peripheral blood T cells to express high-affinity TCRs against tumor antigens — and has extended ACT to common epithelial cancers including colorectal cancer and breast cancer by identifying and expanding neoantigen-reactive TILs. He has published more than 1,000 peer-reviewed papers and has received virtually every major award in oncology and immunology.