Jose Cancelas named director of the Connell and O'Reilly Families Cell Manipulation Core Facility at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Jose Cancelas, MD, PhD, recently joined Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as the director of the Connell and O'Reilly Families Cell Manipulation Core Facility (CMCF).

As Director of CMCF, Cancelas is responsible for cell manufacturing for the adult and pediatric stem cell transplantation and immune effector cell programs at Dana-Farber. As a member of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, he will also oversee cell manufacturing support for patients enrolled on clinical research protocols at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Children's Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital. Cancelas will work closely with laboratory investigators, clinical investigators, and industry collaborators to manufacture innovative cellular products that are tested in a variety of disease settings.

Cancelas is a physician-scientist with a broad background in transfusion medicine, cell therapies, hematology, and stem cell biology. Prior to joining Dana-Farber, he served as Director and Chairman of the Hoxworth Blood Center, University of Cincinnati and at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, as a Leader of the Cincinnati Children's Stem Cell Program in the Cancer and Blood Diseases Institute, and as the Director of the Translational Core Laboratories. With renowned research in hematopoiesis and collaborative studies in gene therapy and hemotherapies, Cancelas has well-established scientific collaborations with investigators at Boston Children's Hospital.

Cancelas is a graduate of Autonomous University of Madrid and University of Alcala de Henares, both in Madrid, Spain, and completed training in the Cancer Research Institute of Barcelona, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, and the University of Cincinnati. He has authored over 220 manuscripts and his research has been published in Nature, Nature Medicine, Cancer Cell, Nature Communications, JCI, PNAS, Blood, and Transfusion among other journals. He is Associate Editor of the journal Transfusion, the Vice-President of the Association for the Advancement of Blood and Biotherapies (AABB), and the President of AABB Foundation.

Jerome Ritz, MD, who led the CMCF for almost 30 years, recently moved into a senior advisory role and will continue to lead his research laboratory.