ALBELDA LAB

Dr. Albelda graduated from Williams College and from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He received his clinical post-graduate training at Penn and is boarded in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Medicine, and Critical Care Medicine. He received post-doctoral laboratory training in the lab of Dr. Clayton Buck at the Wistar Institute. Dr. Albelda is the William Maul Measey Professor of Medicine, Associate Director of the Pulmonary Division, Director of the Thoracic Oncology Research Laboratory, and co-Director of the Translational Center of Excellence for Lung Cancer at Penn. He is the 2010 recipient of the Wagner Award from the International Mesothelioma Interest Group.

Dr. Albelda's research interests focus on developing novel approaches to the treatment of mesothelioma, lung cancers, and other thoracic malignancies.  His clinical interests are primarily in thoracic oncology.  He has led an NCI-funded Program Project aimed at developing new treatments for mesothelioma for the past 23 years.   This project supports clinical CAR T cell trials for  mesothelioma and lung cancer, as well as the supportive translation lab work.  The major areas of recent interest in the lab have been augmentation of anti-tumor immune effects, the tumor microenvironment, mechanisms of T cell dysfunction, and adoptive T cell transfer with an increasing focus on lung cancer.   To study these, Dr. Albelda's lab has developed a wide variety of animal models of lung cancer and mesothelioma that can be used to evaluate new therapies and T cell function.   The lab has also analyzed human samples from many clinical trials.  The lab has extensive experience in lentiviral transduction of human T cells and retroviral transduction of mouse T cells for use in adoptive T cell transfer.