David Avigan

Dr. Avigan is the Director of Beth Israel Deaconess Cancer Center; Chief of the Division of Hematology/Hematologic Malignancies, and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He leads a large program for translational and clinical investigation in cellular immunotherapy for blood cancers. He has developed a personalized tumor vaccine and conducted a series of clinical trials to define safety, immunologic response and clinical efficacy of vaccination across the country. He has established pre-clinical models studying the immune microenvironment in patients undergoing CAR T and bispecific T cell engager therapy. We have developed transcriptomic platforms to identify biomarkers predictive of response to CAR T cell demonstrating the critical contribution of secondary activation of adaptive immune mechanisms. We led a consortium to study the integration of vaccine and CAR T cell therapy to promote durable CAR T cell persistence and disease regression.