Scott E. James, M.D., Ph.D.

Scott James, M.D., Ph.D., makes sure to understand each patient’s goals and priorities as part of creating an individualized treatment plan. He works to provide the best possible outcomes for leukemia patients while conducting research to develop new therapies.

Dr. James pursued his medical, scientific and internal medicine residency training at the University of Washington in Seattle. He then completed a fellowship in hematology/oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where he also served as an attending physician.

When he joined City of Hope^® in 2024, he had 10 peer‑reviewed biomedical publications to his credit. His research, which has been funded by the National Cancer Institute, involves engineering T cells to fight leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. A concurrent goal is to reduce therapy‑associated toxicities such as on‑target, off‑tumor CAR T‑cell toxicity and graft‑versus‑host disease (GVHD) after blood stem cell transplants.

In a Nature Medicine study, Dr. James and his colleagues found that expressing a CD19‑CAR in donated T cells can reduce the risk of GVHD while preserving graft‑versus‑malignancy activity. He has also developed a new methodology to engineer T cells to express multiple CARs and switch receptors or cytokines to overcome heterogeneous or weakly expressed tumor‑associated antigens in myeloma and leukemia models (Blood, Nature Biomedical Engineering). He has submitted multiple patent applications describing new technologies for generating T cells with multiple programmed functions.