van den Brink Lab Research Bio

Marcel van den Brink, M.D., Ph.D., is president and chief physician executive of City of Hope^® Los Angeles and National Medical Center, a member of the Hematologic Malignancies Program, and principal investigator of the Marcel van den Brink Lab. His translational and clinical research focuses on allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT) and immuno-oncology.

The van den Brink Lab aims to understand the gut microbiome as an immune modulator, the role of thymic regeneration in immune response and clinical outcomes, and the mechanisms of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells in hematologic malignancies. This research involves perpetual dialogue between clinical and preclinical mechanistic studies. Dr. van den Brink was first in 2009 to apply culture-free next-generation sequencing to study the role of gut microbiota after allo-HSCT, and his paradigm-shifting studies (published in NEJM, Science, Nature, Nature Medicine, and other high-impact journals) have found wide acclaim in the scientific community and have been translated into many clinical trials. His lab has been continuously funded by NIH since 2001 and he has received national and international awards recognizing his contributions to cancer research.

Dr. van den Brink has investigated the pathophysiology of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), graft-versus-tumor (GVT) activity, and the role of intestinal microbiota in allo-HSCT. His studies have demonstrated that the loss of bacterial diversity and certain commensal gut bacteria is associated with both increased mortality from intestinal GVHD and relapse after allo-HSCT and CAR T cell treatments. These studies have led to clinical trials using autologous fecal microbiota transplant, administration of defined bacterial consortia, and antibiotic stewardship to spare and/or restore the commensal flora with the goal of improving patient outcomes. He has studied mechanisms of thymic and peripheral T cell regeneration to develop strategies to enhance immune reconstitution, several of which have been translated into clinical trials to prevent infection, relapse, and GVHD after allo-HSCT. He has also identified T cell cytolytic pathways involved in organ-specific GVHD and GVT activity, homing pathways that are important for alloreactive T cell homing during intestinal GVHD, and strategies for protecting intestinal stem cells during GVHD. Furthermore, Dr. van den Brink has investigated the capacity of allogeneic donor CD19 CAR T cells to prevent disease relapse after allo-HSCT, as well as developed novel cell engineering approaches to enhance the effectiveness of CAR T cells.