Staying ahead of the game: understanding and managing patient-to-patient variability

Dr Jan Joseph (Jos) Melenhorst 

Dr Jan Joseph (Jos) Melenhorst graduated with a bachelor’s degree in continuing education from Tilburg Fontys Teacher’s College, a master’s degree in Medical Biology from the Nijmegen Catholic University, the Netherlands, and a doctorate of philosophy from the Leiden University, the Netherlands. After a post-doctoral fellowship followed by a staff scientist appointment at the National Institutes of Health he was recruited to the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 by Dr. Carl June, first as Deputy Director of the Clinical Cell and Vaccine Production Facility and later as the Director of Product Development & Correlative Sciences. In this role, he was at the cusp of the first ever CAR T cell therapy approved by FDA: Kymriah. Dr. Melenhorst contributed significantly to the evolution of the CAR manufacturing process and to in-depth mechanistic studies into the immunobiology of CAR T-cell therapies, work that was published in high impact journals such as Nature, Nature Medicine, Cancer Discovery, Science Translational Medicine, and the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Melenhorst’s research aims to understand and improve the efficacy, safety, and product consistency of adoptive cell immunotherapy through biomarker, mechanistic, and product development studies.

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