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Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, is the Director of the Center for Cell Engineering and the incumbent of the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Chair at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is a Member of the Immunology Program and the Department of Medicine.

Dr. Sadelain’s research focuses on human cell engineering and cell therapy to treat cancer and hereditary blood disorders. His laboratory has made several seminal contributions to the field of chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), from their conceptualization and optimization to their clinical translation for cancer immunotherapy. His group was the first to publish dramatic molecular remissions in patients with chemorefractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia following treatment with autologous CD19-targeted T cells.

Dr. Sadelain is the recipient of the Cancer Research Institute’s Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor Immunology, the Sultan Bin Khalifa International Award for Innovative Medical Research on Thalassemia, the NYPLA Inventor of the Year award, the Passano award, the Pasteur-Weizmann award, the Gabbay award, the INSERM International Prize and the Léopold Griffuel award. He previously served on the NIH Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee and as President of the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy.

David R. Liu is Director of the Merkin Institute and Vice-Chair of the Faculty at the Broad Institute; Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University; and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Liu graduated first in his class at Harvard in 1994. He performed research on sterol biosynthesis under Professor E. J. Corey’s guidance as an undergraduate. During his Ph.D. research with Professor Peter Schultz at U. C. Berkeley, Liu initiated the first general effort to expand the genetic code in living cells. He earned his Ph.D. in 1999 and became Assistant Professor at Harvard in the same year. Liu was promoted to Full Professor and became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2005. Liu has published >190 papers and is the inventor of >70 issued U.S. patents. His research and teaching accomplishments have earned distinctions including the NIH Marshall Nirenberg Lecturer, Ronald Breslow Award for Biomimetic Chemistry, the American Chemical Society David Perlman Award, ACS Chemical Biology Award, the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, the Arthur Cope Young Scholar Award, and awards from the Sloan Foundation, Beckman Foundation, NSF CAREER Program, and Searle Scholars Program. In 2016 he was named one of the Top 20 Translational Researchers in the world by Nature Biotechnology, and in 2017 was named to the Nature’s 10 researchers in world. Professor Liu’s research integrates chemistry and evolution to illuminate biology and enable next-generation therapeutics. Prime editing, base editing, PACE, and DNA-templated synthesis are four examples of technologies pioneered in his laboratory. He is the scientific founder or co-founder of seven biotechnology and therapeutics companies, including Editas Medicine, Pairwise Plants, Exo Therapeutics, Beam Therapeutics, and Prime Medicine.