Michel Sadelain

Michel W. Sadelain (born 1960) is a genetic engineer and cell therapist at Columbia University New York, New York. He is the Director of the Columbia Initiative in Cell Engineering and Therapy (CICET). Sadelain also serves as the Director of Columbia University Irving Medical Center's Cancer Cell Therapy Initiative in the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center. Sadelain was previously the Steve and Barbara Friedman Chair, founding director of the Center for Cell Engineering, and the head of the Gene Transfer and Gene Expression Laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is best known for his major contributions to T cell engineering and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy, an immunotherapy based on the genetic engineering of a patient's own T cells to treat cancer. Sadelain also pioneered the use of lentiviral vectors to treat severe hemoglobinopathies such as β-thalassemia and sickle cell disease. Sadelain is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine of France and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Education and career Sadelain was born in 1960 in Paris, France, where he earned his MD at the University of Paris, France, in 1984. After obtaining his PhD in immunology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, in 1989, he trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1994, Sadelain joined Memorial Sloan Kettering as an assistant member in the Sloan Kettering Institute, where he established programs on human hematopoietic stem cell and T cell engineering.

Research Sadelain and his team study gene transfer in hematopoietic stem cells and T cells, the regulation of transgene expression, the biology of chimeric antigen receptors, and therapeutic strategies to enhance immunity against cancer. Sadelain is a recognized leader in the conceptualization and design of synthetic receptors for antigen, which he named chimeric antigen receptors (CARs). T cells can be engineered to express a CAR to acquire the ability to recognize and destroy cancer cells. Sadelain has referred to CAR T cells as a "living drug." A CAR typically comprises an antibody fragment (scFv) to recognize the cancer and a modular signaling domain to activate the T cell and promote T cell multiplication and persistence. CAR T cells are made by extracting a cancer patient's T cells, inserting a CAR into the cell using a vector such as a gamma-retroviral or lentiviral vector, and then re-infusing the genetically instructed T cells. Sadelain's current research makes use of genome editing, which he showed makes better CAR T cells when the CAR is expressed from the TRAC locus.

Sadelain's laboratory designed second generation CARs, which are endowed with both activating and costimulatory properties, which is integral to the success of CAR therapies. In 2003, Sadelain's lab identified CD19 as a target for CAR therapy in mice. Following the establishment of clinical CAR T cell manufacturing by Dr. Isabelle Rivière at MSK, Sadelain's team was the first to report on molecular complete responses induced by CD19 CAR T cells in adults with relapsed, refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The MSK team received FDA breakthrough designation for this treatment in 2014. The US FDA approved the first CAR therapies, targeting CD19 with second generations CARs, in 2017.

Sadelain's research on "off-the-shelf" CAR T cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) is now being developed in a collaboration with Fate Therapeutics. His research with Dr. Prasad S. Adusumilli led to a collaboration with Atara Biotherapeutics, Inc. for a product candidate to treat malignant mesothelioma using mesothelin-targeted CAR T cells named icasM28z. In 2013, Sadelain co-founded Juno Therapeutics Inc.

Sadelain also designed lentiviral vectors encoding the β-globin gene for the treatment of severe hemoglobinopathies, which include β-thalassemia and sickle cell disease. The MSK team was the first to treat patients with β-thalassemia in the US. Sadelain is a named inventor on U.S. Patent No. 7446190B2 covering nucleic acids encoding chimeric T cell receptors. Sadelain is also named on patent U.S. Patent No. 10,370,452 covering compositions and uses of effector T cells expressing a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), where such T cells are derived from a pluripotent stem cell including an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC). The patent is licensed for off-the-shelf, T-cell receptor (TCR)-less CD19 chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell product candidate known as FT819.

Significant publications

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Memberships CRI Accelerator Leadership The American Society for Clinical Investigation American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI)

Awards 2012 William B. Coley Award 2013 Sultan Bin Khalifa International Thalassemia Award 2018 Passano Laureate and Physician Scientist Award 2018 Pasteur-Weizmann/Servier Prize Laureate 2019 Jacob and Louise Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine 2019 INSERM International Prize 2020 Leopold Griffuel Award 2021 ASGCT Outstanding Achievement Award 2023/24 Meyenburg Prize 2024 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences 2024 Canada Gairdner International Award 2024 Warren Alpert Foundation Prize 2024 VinFuture Prize 2025 King Faisal Prize 2025 Merkin Prize 2025 Broermann Medical Innovation Award 2025 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category "Biology and Biomedizin" jointly with Carl H. June. 2026 Tang Prize in the category "Biopharmaceutical Science".