Dr. Edgar Engleman
Dr. Engleman is Professor of Pathology and Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. He joined the faculty after completing training in internal medicine at the University of California San Francisco, biochemistry at the National Institutes of Health, and immunology, rheumatology and transfusion medicine at Stanford. In addition to his role at Stanford Blood Center, Dr. Engleman is Co-Director of the Immunology and Immunotherapy Program at the Stanford Cancer Institute. He has supervised more than 150 research trainees, authored 300 scientific articles and has been an editor of multiple scientific journals. He also teaches a popular course on tumor immunology at Stanford.
For many years Dr. Engleman’s research group, which is composed almost entirely of student trainees, has been studying dendritic cells, a type of rare, but powerful, white blood cells. After developing methods for isolating and arming human dendritic cells, he conceived of the idea to use them to vaccinate patients against their own tumors.
More than 25 years ago, he and his collaborators at Stanford, including staff of the Blood Center, began testing this idea in patients with cancer. His technology provided the basis for the Provenge prostate cancer vaccine, and in 2010 it became the first immunotherapy for cancer to be approved by the FDA. This vaccine opened a new era in where immunotherapies have become a standard component of cancer treatment. Recently, Dr. Engleman’s lab discovered an extremely potent approach to arming and activating dendritic cells in tumor-bearing hosts that doesn’t require removal or manipulation of these cells and has been shown to eradicate a variety of cancers in experimental animals.