Rate My Professor Philip Greenberg

Philip Greenberg, MD, is a distinguished professor of medicine, hematology-oncology, and immunology at the University of Washington and head of the Program in Immunology in the Translational Science and Therapeutics Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, where he holds the Rona Jaffe Foundation Endowed Chair. He earned an AB in Biology from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and an MD summa cum laude from the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in 1971. His training includes an internship and residency in medicine and a postdoctoral fellowship in immunology at the University of California, San Diego, followed by a clinical and research fellowship in oncology at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Joining Fred Hutch and the University of Washington Division of Oncology in 1976, Greenberg was a founding member of both the UW Department of Immunology and the Fred Hutch Program in Immunology. His research in Biology centers on cancer immunotherapy, particularly adoptive T-cell therapies. He was among the first to demonstrate that T cells recognize and eliminate malignant cells and that adoptive transfer of antigen-specific T cells can eradicate disseminated cancer. In 1981, his group showed that tumor antigen-specific CD4+ T cells provide help to CD8+ T cells for tumor eradication, a paper republished as a Pillar of Immunology. In the early 1990s, they pioneered collecting, expanding, and reinfusing patient T cells for therapy, including donor-derived CMV-specific CD8+ T cell clones to protect immunocompromised patients post-hematopoietic cell transplantation, as detailed in a 1995 New England Journal of Medicine paper cited over 2,300 times.

Greenberg's laboratory develops technologies to produce functional antigen-specific T cells, clones high-affinity T cell receptors targeting tumor antigens like WT1, Cyclin A1, and mesothelin, and engineers T cells for sustained function against tumors in melanoma, leukemia, lung, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers. Key publications include 'Cancer immunotherapy: a treatment for the masses' (Science, 2004, 933 citations), 'Tolerance and exhaustion: defining mechanisms of T cell dysfunction' (Trends in Immunology, 2014, 888 citations), and 'Adoptive T cell therapy using antigen-specific CD8+ T cell clones for the treatment of patients with metastatic melanoma' (PNAS, 2002, 1,710 citations). His work has advanced clinical trials, such as phase I/II studies using WT1-specific TCR-transduced T cells for AML, MDS, and CML. Greenberg's influence is evident in over 50,000 Google Scholar citations and leadership roles, including election to the National Academy of Sciences (2023), presidency of the American Association for Cancer Research (2023, president-elect 2022), Distinguished Fellow of the American Association of Immunologists (2019), and recipient of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer's Richard V. Smalley Memorial Award (2018). He contributes to Fred Hutch's Immunotherapy, Pathogen-Associated Malignancies, and Translational Data Science Integrated Research Centers and is a member researcher at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.