Edgar Engleman, MD

Ed Engleman, MD, PhD, is Professor of Pathology and of Medicine Immunology and Rheumatology at Stanford. His research aims to discover ways to manipulate the immune system to treat life-threatening diseases. He founded the Stanford Blood Center in and now serves as its Medical Director. Dr. Engleman is also Co-Director of the Immunology and Immunotherapy Program of the Stanford Cancer Institute. Through the application and use of precise analytical tools to investigate the immune system in mice and humans, his research has uncovered disease-promoting immune abnormalities and then targeted them therapeutically. 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, the first immunotherapy for cancer to be approved (in 2010) by the FDA. This vaccine opened the way to a new era in which immunotherapies are increasingly becoming a standard component of cancer treatment. 

His subsequent research reprogramming tumor-resident immunosuppressive myeloid cells into immunostimulatory cells that present tumor antigens to host T cells, is now in clinical trials for the treatment of multiple cancers. In addition to cancer, Dr. Engleman studies the role of immune cells in neurodegenerative diseases, metabolic diseases, and organ transplant rejection. His work with Stanford colleagues led to a therapy that targets lymphoid tissues with low doses of radiation to induce alloantigen-specific immune tolerance, enabling transplant recipients to retain their allografts without requiring immunosuppressive drugs. This therapy is now in a multicenter clinical trial for kidney transplantation. Dr. Engleman 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.