Steven M. Albelda

Dr. Albelda is on the Scientific Advisory Board for Verismo Therapeutics. He is the William Maul Measey Endowed Professor of Medicine, Director of the Thoracic Oncology Research Laboratory, and co-Director of the Translational Center of Excellence for Lung Cancer at Penn. Dr. Albelda has over 30 years of experience in cancer gene and immunotherapy. His research interests focused on developing novel approaches for the treatment of mesothelioma, lung cancers, and other thoracic malignancies. In 1992, he founded a translational “Thoracic Oncology Research Laboratory” aimed at moving research from “bench to bedside”. He has led an NCI-funded Program Project aimed at developing new treatments for mesothelioma and thoracic malignancies for the past 26 years. He has been involved with more than a dozen “bench to bedside” projects. These include the development of a world-wide, randomized Phase 3 trial to test the use of an adenoviral vector expressing type 1 interferon. He has also helped develop clinical trials of CAR T-cell therapies targeting mesothelin and fibroblast activation protein. Dr. Albelda is a co-founder of a recently formed company (Capstan) focusing on the use of CAR T-cells to treat fibrosis. The major areas of recent interest in his lab have been augmentation of anti-tumor immune effects, the tumor microenvironment, mechanisms of T cell dysfunction, and adoptive T cell transfer targeting tumors and stroma. His lab has developed a wide variety of animal models of lung cancer and mesothelioma that can be used to evaluate new therapies and T cell function. He has also analyzed human samples from many clinical trials. The lab has extensive experience in lentiviral transduction of human T cells and retroviral transduction of mouse T cells for use in adoptive T cell transfer.

Dr. Albelda graduated from Williams College and from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He received his clinical post-graduate training at Penn and was boarded in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Medicine, and Critical Care Medicine. He has won the American Thoracic Society Recognition Award for Scientific Accomplishment Award and was the 2010 recipient of the Wagner Award from the International Mesothelioma Interest Group honoring the top researcher in the field.