Dan S. Kaufman, MD, PhD

Dr. Kaufman is a native of Minnesota (USA). He did his undergraduate work at Stanford University and then completed an MD and a PhD (in Immunology) at the Mayo Medical School and Mayo Graduate School in Rochester, MN. He then completed both residency training in Internal Medicine and a fellowship training in Hematology at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Dr. Kaufman was a faculty member at the University of Minnesota from 2002- 2016. In 2016, Dr. Kaufman moved to San Diego to be a Professor in the Department of Medicine, Divisions of Regenerative Medicine and BMT at UC San Diego School of Medicine. At UCSD, he does clinical work in hematology/BMT and serves as the Director of the Cell Therapy program. He also oversees the UCSD Advanced Cell Therapy Laboratory (ACTL) that provides GMP cell manufacturing to translate new cell-based therapies to clinical trials. Research in the Kaufman lab uses human pluripotent stem cells to understand the development of blood and immune cells. Recent studies have focused on the ability to use human iPSC-derived natural killer (NK) cells to kill diverse types of human cancer cells. These studies have used cellular engineering to enhance the anti-tumor activity of the iPSC-derived NK cells by expression of novel chimeric antigen receptors, stabilized expression of CD16, and other strategies. This work has now been translated into clinical trials for treatment of relapsed/refractory cancers- both hematologic malignancies and solid tumors. Additional studies aim to develop novel approaches for in vivo cell engineering to provide a potentially more efficient strategy to produce targeted, cell-based cancer therapies.