Panelist Bios

Ben Izar, MD, PhD
Vivian and Seymour Milstein Family Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology
Associate Professor of Systems Biology
Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

Benjamin Izar, MD, PhD, is the Vivian and Seymour Milstein Family Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology and Associate Professor of Systems Biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is also Director of the Human Immune Monitoring Core (HIMC). Dr. Izar received his MD/PhD at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, where he graduated summa cum laude. He completed his internal medicine residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital and medical oncology training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, followed by his first faculty position at Danna-Farber Cancer Institute. He completed post-doctoral research training in cancer immunology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Dr. Izar is a physician-scientist with a particular focus on understanding metastasis to the brain and cancer immune evasion. He and his team have led several landmark studies using single-cell genomics that have been published in Nature, Cell, and Science, including most recently a study resolving brain metastases in melanoma and lung cancer.  Furthermore, his laboratory has established novel humanized models to study brain metastasis in the context of an adoptive immune system. His laboratory collaborates broadly with investigators in the departments of neurosurgery, neurology, and neuropathology, among others.

Claire S. Riley, MD
Karen L. K. Miller Associate Professor of Neurology
Director, Columbia University Multiple Sclerosis Center
Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

Claire S. Riley, MD, is the Karen L. K. Miller Associate Professor of Neurology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Director of the Columbia Multiple Sclerosis Center. Dr. Riley earned an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and a medical degree from Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. She completed her neurology residency and clinical neuroimmunology and multiple sclerosis (MS) fellowship at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.  After serving as Clinical Director of the Yale MS Center, she returned to the Columbia Department of Neurology in 2012 to lead Columbia’s Multiple Sclerosis Center. During her tenure the MS Center has become a destination for MS and related disease clinical care, trials, clinical and translational research, and training of clinical neuroimmunology and MS specialists.

In 2020, Dr. Riley was elected to Columbia’s Academy of Clinical Excellence, an elite group of master clinicians recognized by their peers as leaders in the practice of clinical medicine. She is an active clinical trialist with a focus on early phase innovation and directs the recruitment and characterization of the Snapshot cohort study of MS, the prospective component of the National MS Brain Bank, a tissue bank providing pathologic samples to researchers alongside phenotypic and radiographic characterization of the donors.

Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD
Herbert and Florence Irving Professor of Medicine
Director, Columbia Initiative in Cell Engineering and Therapy
Director, Cell Therapy Program in the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center
Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, is the Founding Director of the Columbia Initiative in Cell Engineering and Therapy at Columbia University, where he is the Herbert and Florence Irving Professor of Medicine. He previously founded and directed the Center for Cell Engineering at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he held the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Chair. He received his MD from the University of Paris, his PhD from the University of Alberta, and trained as a post-doctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute at MIT.  

Dr. Sadelain has made numerous key contributions to the emergence and success of CD19 chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy. His research contributed to all its facets from concept to implementation, including T cell engineering technologies, the design of CARs, the identification of CD19 as an effective CAR target, T cell manufacturing processes, and the clinical translation of CD19 CAR therapy for the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Dr. Sadelain is the recipient of the Coley Award (Cancer Research Institute), Passano Award (Johns Hopkins), Pasteur-Weizmann/Servier International Prize, French Academy of Sciences Medal, Gabbay Award (Brandeis University), INSERM International Prize, Léopold Griffuel Award, ASGCT Outstanding Achievement Award, Breakthrough Prize, Gairdner International Award, Warren Alpert Prize (Harvard), VinFuture, Meyenburg Award, and King Faisal Prize.

Catherine Spina, MD, PhD
Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology
Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

Catherine Spina, MD, PhD, earned her BA, MA and MD/PhD at Boston University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. She completed her residency in radiation oncology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC)/ NewYork-Presbyterian. As an Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and physician-scientist, Dr. Spina cares for patients with genitourinary cancers. She leads a translational research laboratory focused on elucidating the mechanisms and therapeutic implications of immune modulation by tumor irradiation by conventional external beam radiotherapy and radiopharmaceuticals. One area of focus is understanding the mechanisms underlying the expansion of suppressive myeloid cells in the tumor microenvironment for the development of novel therapies to combine with radiation and other immunotherapies to maximize clinical benefit. To support these efforts, she leads the Translational Oncology Tissue Processing Platform enabling collection of human biospecimens for single cell-level analyses and mechanistic study.

Dr. Spina’s preclinical and translational discoveries have been translated to the clinic, including an investigator-initiated phase 2 clinical trial for men with oligometastatic prostate cancer combining ablative radiotherapy to all sites of metastatic disease with adenosine signaling modulators and anti-PD-1 (SBRT-AMICO, NCT05915442). Meanwhile, her group is exploring the single cell level and immunologic impact of Lu- and Ac-based radiopharmaceuticals in preclinical models of prostate cancer and in men with metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) to drive mechanistic discovery and rational design of combination therapies. She is thrilled to be partnering with Dr. Jeremy Worley, expert in functional genomics, and Dr. Aleksandar Obradovic, computational immunologist, to explore mechanistic determinants of T cell tumor tropism to develop Next-Gen CAR-T for solid tumors in collaboration with the Chan Zukerberg BioHub NY.