Conference Speakers

I am a physician-scientist with broad background in transfusion medicine, cell therapies, hematology and stem cell biology. My long-standing interest in hematopoiesis began during my doctoral and postdoctoral work in the Cancer Research Institute of Barcelona, the Erasmus University of Rotterdam and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Since 2018 I was the Director of Hoxworth Blood Center, a center with national and international reputation for its interest in developing and validating new blood products for transfusion and transplantation. Clinically, I was also the Medical Director for Cell Therapies at Hoxworth Blood Center and the Medical Director of the Cell Manipulation Laboratory of the Cancer & Blood Diseases of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and my work has focused on intending to develop new biotherapies with augmented efficacy and/or safety profiles. I am now the Executive Director of the Connell-O’Reilly Cell Manipulation Core Facility at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as well as an Independent Investigator and Faculty Member in the Division of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies under the Department of Medical Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I have published over 220 peer-reviewed manuscripts and I have been funded by the NIH since 2009.

Our translational group has optimized methods of progenitor and granulocyte transfusion in neutropenic patients and validated novel methods to preserve and store plasma, platelets, red cells and T cells in clinical multi-center trials. Our group is now actively searching for the mechanisms that control cold platelet damage and identified key molecular signals and methods to prevent cold storage damage. Our group has generated first-in-human clinical data for a variety of biological therapies.

Our basic biology laboratory has been pivotal in the elucidation of the cellular and molecular mechanisms of hematopoietic cells through the Rho family of GTPases in health and disease. We provided the basis for understanding of the physiological cell-autonomous and microenvironment/cytokine signaling and metabolic/mitochondrial dependent mechanisms in the context of myeloid progenitor migration and bone marrow retention. Our group also defined the mechanisms that control oncogenic tyrosine kinase signals dependent transformation in leukemic progenitors and identifying specific intrinsic and microenvironment-dependent signaling through Rho GTPases. Finally, through hematopoietic differentiation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) from SCN patients, our laboratory has unveiled the pathogenetic mechanisms of neutropenia in patients with ELANE mutations resulting in neutrophil elastase intracellular mislocalization, endoplasmic reticulum stress and apoptosis along with a non-cell autonomous effect on myeloid progenitors responsible to a bias towards monocytosis. Our laboratory has also developed specific methods for the characterization of iPSC from the progenitor cell biology consortium and developed/validated new methods for cryopreservation/delivery of functionally active lymphocyte populations in the context of adoptive transfer.