Michael A. Caligiuri, MD
Dr. Michael Caligiuri (pronounced KALAJURY) is President of the City of Hope National Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. Dr. Caligiuri is also the Deana and Steve Campbell Physician-in-Chief Distinguished Chair.
Prior to his appointment at City of Hope in 2018, Dr. Caligiuri was the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ohio State University (OSU) James Cancer Hospital (2008 to 2017) and Director of OSU’s Comprehensive Cancer Center (CCC; 2003 to 2017); he served as the Director of OSU’s Division of Hematology-Oncology from 2000 through 2008. While Director of the CCC and CEO of OSU hospital, Dr. Caligiuri oversaw the construction of the third largest cancer hospital in the US and recruited more than 300 physicians and scientists to OSU.
Dr. Caligiuri is a physician–scientist whose basic and translational work has focused on immunotherapy for both liquid and solid tumors. His laboratory has studied human natural killer (NK) cells for 35 years and has produced more than 400 original peer-reviewed publications on NK cells and/or cancer. Pivotal discoveries from the Caligiuri laboratory have made it possible to bring chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) NK cells from the laboratory into the clinic for cancer therapy. These include proprietary retroviral transduction of human NK cells, the elucidation of the site, stages, cytokines, and molecular mechanisms involved in the differentiation of human NK cells from CD34(+) hematopoietic stem cells, and the discovery of IL-15 as the key cytokine for human NK-cell development, survival, growth, and activation. These 3 discoveries alone have been critical for the genesis of CAR NK cells from peripheral blood, umbilical cord blood, and induced pluripotent stem cells. Most of this work was accomplished with his collaborator, Jianhua Yu, PhD.
Dr. Caligiuri has designed and conducted clinical studies modulating NK cells for more than 1000 patients with cancer. More than 100 students have trained in the Caligiuri laboratory and have received more than 200 local, state, national, and international awards for their research.
Dr. Caligiuri is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, and he is an elected Fellow of the AAAS. He is past president of the Association of American Cancer Institutes and past president of the Society for Natural Immunity and most recently served as President of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), the world’s largest cancer research organization. Dr. Caligiuri has served on the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Board of Scientific Counselors and Board of Scientific Advisors; he was chairman of the Institute of Medicine’s National Cancer Policy Forum from 2014 to 2016. In 2010, Dr. Caligiuri was one of 4 individuals in the country to receive a MERIT award from the NCI for his work on immunity and cancer, and in 2016, he received an Outstanding Investigator Award from the NCI. In 2018, he received the lifetime achievement award from the Stanford University School of Medicine and was elected Fellow of the AACR Academy and a member of the USA National Academy of Medicine.
Dr. Caligiuri is cofounder of Pelotonia (www.pelotonia.org), the Oncology Research Information Exchange Network (www.ORIENcancer.org), CancerBridge (www.mycancerbridge.com), the Ohio State University Drug Development Institute (https://cancer.osu.edu/research-and-education/drug-development-institute), and CytoImmune Therapeutics (www.cytoImmune.com).
Dr. Caligiuri earned his undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and his masters and medical degrees from the Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, then completed a fellowship in medical oncology, bone marrow transplantation, and immunology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Caligiuri then spent 7 years at Roswell Park Cancer Institute as an assistant, associate, and full professor before moving to Ohio State University in 1997 and City of Hope in 2018.
Complete list of Dr. Caligiuri’s published work: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=caligiuri+ma