Michel Sadelain is the founding director of the Center for Cell Engineering and head of the Gene Transfer and Gene Expression Laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK),where he holds the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Chair. He is also a member of the department of medicine at Memorial Hospital and the Immunology program of the Sloan Kettering Institute.
Sadelain has made major contributions to the generation and optimization of CAR T cells to treat cancer, as well as the development of stem cell therapies for blood disorders. Sadelain’s work has focused on developing CAR T cells targeting CD19 to treat B cell malignancies. In 2002, his group was the first to report the design of CARs that combine signaling modules and thus enable human peripheral blood T cells to not only lyse tumor cells but expand upon repeated exposure to antigen, which he later referred to as “living drugs”. In 2003, his group provided the first demonstration that human T cells expressing a CAR specific for CD19 eliminated leukemias and lymphomas established in mice, paving the way for CD19 CAR therapy. The team led by Sadelain went on to demonstrate the efficacy of CD19 CAR T cells in adult acute lymphoblastic leukemia, reporting dramatic clinical responses in patients with refractory disease.
Sadelain received his M.D. from the University of Paris, France, in 1984 and his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta, Canada, in 1989. After completing a clinical residency at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Saint-Antoine in Paris, Sadelain carried out a postdoctoral fellowship with Richard Mulligan, Ph.D., at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before joining MSK in 1994 as an assistant member. In 2008, Sadelain founded the Center for Cell Engineering, which focuses on advancing gene and cell-based medicines at MSK. He has received numerous awards, including the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor Immunology, the Pasteur/Weizmann Award, the Leopold Griffuel Award, and the Breakthrough Prize.
