Dr. Steven Rosenberg pioneered the first effective immunotherapies for patients with advanced cancer.

Chief, Surgery Branch at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland and Professor of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences and at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, D.C., Dr. Rosenberg is also Foreign Adjunct Professor in Cell Therapy, Department of Laboratory Medicine at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.

His basic and clinical studies of interleukin-2 directly resulted in the approval of this immunotherapy by the US Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of patients with metastatic melanoma and renal cancer, many of whom remain disease-free over 25 years after treatment.  

His studies of cell transfer immunotherapy that resulted in durable complete remissions in patients with metastatic melanoma were the first to directly demonstrate the effective role of T lymphocytes in human cancer immunotherapy. He pioneered the development of gene therapy and was the first to successfully insert foreign genes into humans. He was the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of genetically engineered CAR-T cells to mediate the regression of B-cell malignancies in humans, a treatment now approved by the FDA for widespread use.  

In his more recent work, Dr. Rosenberg established new approaches for the application of immunotherapy to patients with a variety of common solid epithelial cancers by targeting the unique mutations present in the patient’s cancer. 

Dr. Rosenberg is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He has published over 1100 papers in the peer-reviewed literature. His h-index of 185 continues to make him one of the highest cited clinician/scientists in the world.