Jan Joseph Melenhorst, Ph.D.

Member, Cell Therapy Scientific Advisory Board

Dr. Jan Joseph (Jos) Melenhorst is a translational T cell immunologist whose career evolved from elucidating the immunobiology of autoimmune disorders to developing a better understanding of T cell responses across HLA barriers and anti-tumor immunity by TCR-guided and chimeric antigen-reprDr. Jan Joseph (Jos) Melenhorst is a translational T cell immunologist whose career evolved from elucidating the immunobiology of autoimmune disorders to developing a better understanding of T cell responses across HLA barriers and anti-tumor immunity by TCR-guided and chimeric antigen-reprogrammed T cells. He obtained his PhD at the University of Leiden, Netherlands (Department of Hematology) on the immune etiology of Aplastic Anemia. In 1998 he moved to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he did his research on the immunobiology of marrow failure syndromes, leukemic disorders, and allogeneic stem cell transplantation. In 2012 he was recruited by Dr. Carl June to the University of Pennsylvania, first as Deputy Director of their clinical manufacturing (cGMP) facility, then as Director of Product Development & Correlative Sciences where he was at the cusp of the first ever CAR T cell therapy approved by FDA: Kymriah. Further, Dr. Melenhorst led the development of a correlative assay pipeline for the first triple CRISPR/Cas9 genome edited, TCR tumor-redirected T cell product in the US, later publishing in Science magazine. As he become a full Professor at the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, he focused efforts on  translational sciences of immunogene therapies.  Most recently, Dr. Melenhorst was appointed director of the new Cell Therapy and Immuno-Engineering Program, and Vice Chair of the Center for Immunotherapy and Precision Immuno-Oncology at Cleveland Clinic.