David Miklos, MD, PhD

David Miklos, MD, PhD, is professor of medicine at Stanford University Medical Center, where he became chief of the Division of BMT and Cellular Therapy in 2020. He is also the clinical director of the Center for Cancer Cell Therapy. Dr Miklos was an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame. He earned his MD and PhD in genetics at Yale Medical School before training as a hematologist-oncologist and bone marrow transplant clinician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School. He joined Stanford University in 2004.

Dr Miklos leads a multimodality research group that fosters the development of both laboratory immunologists and clinical translational researchers. He has led 7 investigator-initiated trials and 8 industry-sponsored studies with site principal investigator responsibilities in 15 others. The Miklos lab first pioneered protein microarray technologies to discover clinically relevant allogeneic antibodies. Their discovery that allogeneic HY antibodies develop in association with chronic graft-versus-host disease (cGVHD) revealed a critical role of B cells in cGVHD pathogenesis, and their clinical trials established cGVHD therapeutic benefits using the anti–B-cell drug rituximab and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of ibrutinib in 2017. 

Dr Miklos led chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell trials supporting the FDA approval of second- and third-line axicabtagene ciloleucel for patients with relapsed/refractory aggressive large B-cell lymphoma and brexucabtagene autoleucel for patients with mantle cell lymphoma. His research identified antigen loss as the major mechanism of treatment failure following CAR19 T-cell therapy for lymphoma. His clinical translational CAR T-cell research lab quantifies tumor antigen density with multiplexed flow cytometry, quantifies and single-cell characterizes CAR T-cell expansion in blood and tumor, and pioneered lymphoma circulating tumor DNA for lymphoma minimal residual disease.