Stephan Grupp is the Chief of the Cellular Therapy and Transplant Section, Director of the Cancer Immunotherapy Program, and Medical Director of The Cell and Gene Therapy Lab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), as well as the Yetta Dietch Novotny Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Dr Grupp graduated from the University of Cincinnati after completing the MD/PhD program with a PhD in Immunology. He completed pediatric residency at the Boston Children’s Hospital, followed by a fellowship in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and postdoctoral work in Immunology at Harvard University. He then joined the faculty at Harvard University until 1996, when he came to CHOP. His primary area of clinical research is the use of CAR T and other engineered cell therapies in relapsed pediatric cancers. He led the pediatric ALL trials of CTL019 (now approved as Kymriah), including the largest and most successful engineered T-cell therapy clinical trial conducted to date, as well as the global registration trial for CTL019. As a result of this work, he presented the Clinical Perspective at the July 2018 FDA ODAC meeting, at which reviewers voted 10–0 for recommendation of approval for Kymriah in pediatric ALL. His primary laboratory interest is the development of new cell therapy treatments for pediatric cancers. Dr Grupp was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019.
