Hans-peter Kiem MD, PhD

Dr. Hans-Peter Kiem received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Ulm. After working with Drs. Frickhofen and Heimpel at the University of Ulm, he joined Dr. Karl Blume’s research group at Stanford University as a research fellow to study molecular abnormalities in patients with lymphoma and minimal residual disease. After a 2-year fellowship at Stanford, he completed a residency in Internal Medicine at Vanderbilt University in the physician-scientist pathway. In 1992, he joined the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to complete a fellowship in Oncology.

Dr. Kiem also has extensive experience training students and postdoctoral fellows and has mentored more than 45 trainees in the lab over the past 20 years. Many of his trainees now hold tenured faculty positions in the US and in Germany. He is the sponsor of four clinical stem cell gene therapy studies, including glioblastoma, Fanconi anemia, and two studies for HIV/AIDS. He has served 4 years as a member of the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) and 1 year as Chair, and is thus very familiar with all gene therapy applications. Dr. Kiem also served on the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT) and American Society of Hematology (ASH) Stem Cell committees, and for both societies as Chair in 2016/2017.

Our research has focused on the biology and transplantation of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and on the development of technologies to expand and/or genetically modify HSCs for the treatment of infectious diseases such as HIV, genetic diseases, and cancer. We are also studying in vivo HSC selection and chemoprotection strategies, which have led to a clinical study in patients with glioblastoma. Many different congenital and acquired diseases could be treated by introducing new genes into stem cells, and several diseases have now been successfully treated by HSC gene therapy.