Faculty Biographies

Dr Patrick Brown is associate professor of oncology and pediatrics and director of the Pediatric Leukemia Program at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD.

Dr Brown earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the United States Military Academy in West Point, NY, and a master’s degree in philosophy and politics from Oxford University in England. After earning his medical degree from the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, Dr Brown was an intern and resident in pediatrics at Johns Hopkins, and subsequently completed a joint clinical fellowship with Johns Hopkins and the National Cancer Institute in pediatric hematology/oncology.

Dr Brown is the vice chair for relapse and an executive steering committee member of the ALL Committee in the Children’s Oncology Group, and chairs the National Comprehensive Cancer Network’s Clinical Guidelines Panels for adult and pediatric ALL. His research focuses on developing molecularly targeted therapies for high-risk childhood leukemias.

Rupert Handgretinger, MD, is professor of pediatrics and since 2005 the chairman of the Department of General Pediatrics and Hematology/Oncology at Children’s University Hospital, Tübingen, Germany. In 2010, he was appointed medical director of the Children’s University Hospital. From 2000–2005, he was the director of the Division of Stem Cell Transplantation at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN, USA, where he served as a full faculty member and professor of pediatrics at the University of Tennessee, Memphis. He received his medical degree from the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, where he completed his training in pediatrics and hematology/oncology.

Prof Handgretinger’s main research interests have been cellular immunotherapeutic approaches to the treatment of children with various forms of cancer. He was one of the first to introduce immunotherapy with bispecific antibodies in children with relapsed/refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia (R/R ALL), and is also involved in clinical trials using anti-CD19 and anti-CD19/22 chimeric antigen receptors in pediatric R/R ALL. He contributed to the establishment of graft-engineering techniques to introduce new concepts in haploidentical transplantation, and pioneered the T-cell receptor alpha/beta depletion technology in allogeneic transplantation. He is also involved in the elucidation of mechanisms of graft-mediated antileukemia and anti-solid tumor effects.

Prof Franco Locatelli is head of the Department of Paediatric Haematology and Oncology, IRCCS Bambino Gesù Children’s Hospital in Rome, and full professor of pediatrics at the Sapienza University of Rome in Italy. He leads the largest program of childhood allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) in Italy and was recently appointed president of the Italian Higher Council of Health (Consiglio Superiore di Sanità), the technical scientific advisory body to the Ministry of Health. He graduated in medicine and surgery from the University of Pavia in Italy, where he also obtained a specialization in pediatrics and hematology. In 2005, he received the Gold Medal for Merit in public health by the president of the Italian Republic.

Prof Locatelli is an expert in childhood hematologic and oncologic malignancies. He was the president of the Italian Association for Pediatric Hematology-Oncology from 2004 to 2006, and served as chairman of the EWOG-MDS consortium from 2005 to 2011. Currently, he coordinates the national protocols for children with newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia and relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He has implemented in Italy the first-in-human academic studies on children with CD19+ lymphoid malignancies using second-generation retroviral chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells and on children with GD2+ neuroblastoma.

Prof Locatelli is also involved in the development and validation of gene therapy approaches in patients with thalassemia and sickle cell disease and he has extensive experience in running phase I/II clinical trials. He is the author or co-author of 1,070 peer-reviewed articles published in international journals and he has an overall impact factor above 5000 and an H-index of 99 (Scopus source).