Larry Kwak

Larry Kwak, MD, PhD was until recently the Chairman of the Department of Lymphoma and Myeloma and Co-Director of the Center for Cancer Immunology Research at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, where he also held the Justin Distinguished Chair in Leukemia Research. Since April 2015, Professor Kwak has served as Director, Toni Stephenson Lymphoma Center and Professor, Department of Hematology and Hematopoietic cell transplantation at City of Hope (www.cityofhope.org/faculty/larry-w.-kwak). Dr. Kwak previously served as Head of the Vaccine Biology Section at the NCI for 12 years. His NCI laboratory is credited with the bench-to-clinic development of a therapeutic cancer vaccine for B-cell malignancies, which was recently reported as positive in a landmark national Phase III clinical trial. He has authored more than 160 articles, which have been published in journals such as Science, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, and Nature Medicine. In 2010 Dr. Kwak was named to the TIME100, one of the world’s 100 most influential people by TIME magazine, for his 20 year commitment to the science of cancer vaccines. Dr. Kwak was awarded the Ho-Am prize in Medicine, Korea’s highest honor, for his work in immunotherapy in June 2016. Awarded since 1991, the Ho-Am is funded by the Korean company Samsung and is considered akin to Nobel Prize recognition.