Vinod P. Balachandran

Vinod P. Balachandran (born 1980) is an American surgical oncologist. As a surgeon and scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, he led the discovery and clinical development of RNA vaccines for pancreatic cancer. Balachandran is the founding Director of The Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and holds the Hutham S. Olayan and Robert F. Raucci chair. Balachandran’s research focuses on discovering new immunotherapies to treat pancreatic cancer.

Early life and education Balachandran was born in 1980 in the United States. His mother was the director of cytotechnology at the Albany College of Pharmacy, while his father was a professor of physics at Syracuse University. Balachandran earned a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Cornell University in 2001. He then received his Doctor of Medicine from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2006, followed by a residency in general surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Balachandran then completed fellowships in Tumor Immunology and Complex Surgical Oncology Fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering.

Career Balachandran joined the faculty at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2015. While there, he has led research to identify new ways to treat pancreatic cancer with immunotherapy. In 2024, Balachandran established The Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center as its founding director, and was named the Hutham S. Olayan and Robert F. Raucci Chair in 2025. Balachandran was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2026.

Research Balachandran and his team have been credited with discovering new mechanisms of natural anti-tumor immunity in pancreatic cancer patients and harnessing these findings to develop new clinical immunotherapies.

In 2017, Balachandran’s lab discovered that rare long-term survivors of pancreatic cancer develop natural immunity to mutation-derived neoantigens. The discovery challenged the assumption that pancreatic cancer, a tumor with few mutations, is immunologically inert, incapable of generating immunogenic neoantigens, and therefore unsuited for immunotherapy. Balachandran then led clinical development of the first phase-1 clinical trial of personalized cancer neoantigen vaccines, autogene cevumeran, for pancreatic cancer. The team discovered that vaccines triggered a strong immune response in half of the treated patients that correlated with delayed recurrence. In long-term follow-up, the study found that eight of 16 vaccinated participants had a lasting immune response, and seven of those participants remained alive up to six years following treatment.

In complementary work, Balachandran’s team discovered a new potential therapeutic target that boosts local immunity in pancreatic cancer. His research team found that the cytokine IL-33 can activate a unique type of immune cell enriched in long-term survivors of pancreatic cancer – group 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s) – to boost anti-tumor immunity. 2017 Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator Award 2017 Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Presidential Award 2018 National Pancreas Foundation Rising Star Award 2019 Phillip A. Sharp Award for Innovation in Collaboration 2020 Pershing Square Sohn Prize for Young Investigators in Cancer Research 2023 Trailblazer Prize for Clinical Scientists, Foundation for the NIH 2024 Yvonne Award for Breakthrough Research, Oncodaily 2025 AAISCR Outstanding Scientist Award 2025 TIME100 Most Influential People in Health 2025 Washington Post’s Next 50

Selected Publications