Yangbing Zhao MD, PhD

Dr. Yangbing Zhao is currently the Director of the TCEL at the Abramson Cancer Center and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He is a graduate of the Third Medical University in Chongqing, China, where he received his PhD and MD. He was a postdoctoral student and visiting scientist at The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, from 1996 - 2000 where he studied tolerance induction through genetically engineered T cells for allogeneic bone marrow transplantation.

For the next two years he was a research associate at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, where he worked on RNA transfected dendritic cell vaccines against tumors. Next, he was a research fellow at the Surgery Branch of the National Cancer Institute at the U.S. National Institutes of Health from 2003 - 2008 where he developed NY-ESO-1 TCR and Her2/Neu CAR transduced T cells into clinical trials. From there, he joined The Translational Research Program under Dr. Carl June where he became the director of the TCEL. He is also currently a member of the International Society for the Biological Therapy of Cancer (ISBTC).