Michael A. Caligiuri, MD, (pronounced KALAJURY) is President of the City of Hope National Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. He also holds the Deana and Steve Campbell Physician-in-Chief Distinguished Chair.
Prior to his appointment at City of Hope in February of 2018, Dr. Caligiuri was The CEO of The Ohio State University (OSU) James Cancer Hospital (2008-2017) and Director of OSU’s Comprehensive Cancer Center (CCC; 2003-2017); he served as the Director of OSU’s Division of Hematology-Oncology from 2000 through 2008. While CCC Director and hospital CEO, Dr. Caligiuri oversaw the construction of the 3rd largest cancer hospital in the United States and recruited over 300 physicians and scientists to OSU.

Dr. Caligiuri is a physician – scientist whose basic and translational work has focused on immunotherapy for both liquid and solid tumors. His laboratory has studied human natural killer (NK) cells for 35 years with over 400 original peer-reviewed publications on NK cells and/or cancer. Pivotal discoveries from the Caligiuri laboratory have made it possible to bring chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) NK cells from the laboratory into the clinic for cancer therapy. These include proprietary retroviral transduction of human NK cells, the elucidation of the site, stages, cytokines and molecular mechanisms involved in the differentiation of human NK cells from CD34(+) hematopoietic stem cells, and the discovery of IL-15 as the key cytokine for human NK cell development, survival, growth, and activation. These three discoveries alone have been critical for the genesis of CAR NK cells from peripheral blood, umbilical cord blood and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Most all of this work was accomplished with his collaborator, Jianhua Yu, PhD.

Dr. Caligiuri has designed and conducted clinical studies modulating NK cells for over 1,000 patients with cancer. Over 100 students have trained in the Caligiuri laboratory and have received over 200 local, state, national or international awards for their research.

Dr. Caligiuri is an elected member of the American Association for Clinical Investigation and the American Association of Physicians, and he is an elected Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is past president of the Association for American Cancer Institutes; past president of the Society of Natural Immunity, and most recently served as president of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), the world’s largest cancer research organization. Dr. Caligiuri has served on the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Board of Scientific Counselors and Board of Scientific Advisors; He was chairman of the Institute of Medicine’s National Cancer Policy Forum from 2014-2016. In 2010, Dr. Caligiuri was one of four individuals in the country to receive a MERIT award from the National Cancer Institute for his work on immunity and cancer, and in 2016 he received an Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute. In 2018, Dr. Caligiuri received the lifetime achievement award from Stanford University School of Medicine, was elected a Fellow of the AACR Academy and a member of the USA National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Caligiuri is co-founder of Pelotonia (www.pelotonia.org), The Oncology Research Information Exchange Network (www.ORIENcancer.org), CancerBridge (www.mycancerbridge.com), The Ohio State University Drug Development Institute (https://cancer.osu.edu/research-and-education/drug-development-institute), and CytoImmune Therapeutics (www.cytoImmune.com).

Dr. Caligiuri earned his undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo, his masters and medical degrees from Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, then completed a fellowship in medical oncology, bone marrow transplantation and immunology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School. He next spent seven years at Roswell Park Cancer Institute as an assistant, associate and full professor before moving to The Ohio State University in 1997, and City of Hope in 2018.

Complete List of Dr. Caligiuri’s Published Work: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=caligiuri+ma