Richard Edelson

Richard Edelson is the Anthony Brady Professor of Dermatology at the Yale School of Medicine. He is a past director of the Yale Cancer Center, and an elected fellow of both the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians. He is known for his research discoveries in non-Hodgkins lymphoma, particularly his early career introduction of the disease category concept of Cutaneous T Cell Lymphoma (CTCL), and his discovery of extracorporeal photochemotherapy (ECP) as an immunotherapy for cancer, transplant reactions and autoimmunity.

Early life and education Richard Edelson grew up in New Jersey, where his father ran a dermatology practice. Edelson graduated from Hamilton College with an undergraduate degree in Chemistry, before earning his MD at the Yale School of Medicine in 1970. Following his graduation, at the height of the Vietnam War, Edelson applied to perform research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and, as formally part of the Navy, fulfilled the mandatory military service obligation. These positions combined “highly specialized clinical care with advanced scientific research” according to Yale Medical School.

Early career When at the NIH, he was assigned to the National Cancer Institute, from 1972 to 1975, where he held the rank of Lieutenant Commander and simultaneously was an immunology research fellow at the National Cancer Institute and was in charge of lymphoma patients. Here he discovered that lymphoma with prominent skin involvement was commonly a special kind of cancer, which he entitled ‘cutaneous T-cell lymphoma” or CTCL. He next became an assistant professor of dermatology at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. between 2003 and 2008 and Deputy Dean of Yale School of Medicine from 2000 to 2003, overseeing all clinical departments. As Cancer Center Director he secured a renewed grant from the National Cancer Institute for $1.87 million annually, which has designated the Yale Cancer Center the only Comprehensive Cancer Center in southern New England as of the end of his tenure. He also oversaw the building of the new cancer hospital and restructured the Cancer Center’s integration of clinical care and scientific inquiry. In 2008, he was named the first Lerner Professor of Dermatology. As a mentor, sixteen of his physician trainees have gone on to lead Dermatology departments at US medical schools and abroad, including at leading departments at Yale, Harvard, Stanford, NYU and Oregon. using ultraviolet light. His experiments included partnering with Columbia, the University of California at San Francisco, and the universities of Düsseldorf, Vienna and Pennsylvania. While it had long been recognized by immunologists that dendritic cells (DCs) are the principal initiators of selective immunity and tolerance, the therapeutic potential of DCs had been unrealized due to a lack of knowledge of how these cells are produced by the body, where and when they are needed. The Edelson laboratory program reverse engineered the clinical efficacy of ECP into the discovery that those physiologic DCs (phDCs), which naturally function successfully in experimental animals and humans, are produced by controllable and tunable platelet signaling of monocyte-to-dendritic cell maturation. The broad therapeutic implications of this discovery are now being developed by a partnership between Yale University, the Federal Government, the Gates Foundation, and Transimmune AG.

In 2023 Edelson’s became the co-principal investigator on the first ever grant awarded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, for the implementation of mRNA vaccines for cancer as a part of the Federal Cancer Moonshot program. The project, entitled “Curing the Uncurable via RNA Encoded Immunogene Tuning”, was a collaboration between his lab at Yale, the University of Georgia, and co-principal investigator Philip Santangelo at Emory University. Part of the project is to enable researchers to program dendritic cells with synthetic mRNA so that the immune system can attack cancer cells while not affecting healthy cells. Edelson has stated that this research is partially a long-term continuation of his early research at NCI. Edelson’s work on controlling emerging microbial infections has been funded by the Gates Foundation. the American Skin Association's National Mentorship Award, and the Dermatology Foundation's Discovery Award and the International Society of Cutaneous Lymphoma Lifetime Achievement Award. Of the more than two thousand graduates of the NIH Physician Scientist Training Program, he was one of eight selected physician-scientists whose investigative careers were featured in an eight-hour audiobook, narrated by actor Alan Alda, released by Audible.Com in December 2020, as a tribute to pivotal federally funded scientifically-driven medical advances.