Principal Investigator

Marco Ruella, MD

Assistant Professor of Medicine
 mruella@upenn.edu

Dr. Marco Ruella is a Physician-Scientist and Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Ruella treats patients affected by hematological cancers and specializes in immunotherapy approaches. His laboratory focuses on the mechanisms of relapse after chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR T) immunotherapies to rationally design innovative combined immunotherapies for relapsing/refractory leukemia and lymphoma. Dr. Ruella obtained his medical degree with high honors and completed his specialization in clinical hematology at the University of Torino, Italy. He was an attending physician at the Hematology and Cell Therapy Division of the Mauriziano Hospital and was an Instructor at the Biotechnology School at the University of Torino. From late 2012, he was a Post-doctoral Fellow and then an Instructor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies (Drs. Kalos, Gill, and June). From 2017 to 2018 he served as Associate Director of Dr. Carl H. June’s laboratory. In 2018, Dr. Ruella was appointed Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology and the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies and Scientific Director of the Lymphoma Program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Ruella was presented with many awards and honors, including the inaugural SITC EMD-Serono Cancer Immunotherapy Clinical Fellowship (2014), the AACR-BMS Oncology Fellowship in Clinical Cancer Research (2015), the ASH Scholar Award (2016), an NIH K99-R00 award (2017), the “Paola Campese” Award Leukemia Research (2017), the Cancer Support Community Award (2018), the 2018 ASH Joanne Levy, MD, Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement, the Gilead Sciences Research Scholar in Hematology/Oncology and the Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation Award (2020), the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Translational Research Program (2021), the Alan Steinberg Award (2022), an NIH R01/R37 (2022), an NIH P01 (2023) and was inducted into the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2023. Dr. Ruella is Senior Editor for Molecular Cancer Therapeutics (AACR) and Associate Editor for the Journal of Immunotherapy for Cancer (SITC). He serves as the inaugural Chair of the SITC Cellular Therapy Committee and is the immediate past Chair of the ASH Scientific Committee on Transplant Biology and Cellular Therapy. He serves as a consultant for several companies and sits on the advisory board of several major biotech-pharma in the space of immunotherapy for cancer. Dr. Ruella is the scientific founder of viTToria biotherapeutics.