DR MADHAV DHODAPKAR

Coleader, cancer immunology, Yale

Dr Madhav Dhodapkar is a researcher in cancer immunology and the role of the immune system in controlling cancer at the Yale Cancer Center. He heads a research team that is combining new approaches for early detection and prevention of cancer, and exploring how the immune system regulates the transition to cancer.

Dr Dhodapkar was awarded the US National Cancer Institute’s Outstanding Investigator award with $7 million in research funding in 2016. He studied medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi before moving to the United States for a fellowship in haematology and oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. He has worked as faculty at the Myeloma Institute in Little Rock, Arakansas, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, at New York’s Rockefeller University.

In 2002, Dhodapkar was named a New York Community Trust Scholar in Blood Diseases Research. His research interests include immunobiology of myeloma (a cancer arising from plasma cells), dendritic cell biology, and developing novel biological approaches to treat cancer. His research strategies have led to clinical tumour remissions in myeloma patients. Dr Dhadopar says his goal is to learn to harness the properties of the immune system to detect, prevent and treat cancer, with focus on multiple myeloma.