Rizwan Romee

Associate Professor

Rizwan Romee is a physician-scientist who leads the natural killer cell therapeutics programme at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. His laboratory genetically engineers human NK cells to strengthen their attack on tumours and to counter the immune-suppressive environment around them. Work he carried out at Washington University helped define human memory-like NK cells, which persist for months after infusion, and he led a first-in-human trial of those cells in patients with advanced acute myeloid leukaemia. At the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center he runs translational trials combining memory-like NK cells with an IL-15 super-agonist and a CTLA-4 inhibitor in AML and MDS relapsing after transplant, in multiple myeloma and in head and neck cancer. He was the 2021 grant recipient of Harvard's i3 immuno-engineering centre.