President-Elect

Jose Cancelas, MD, PhD, CABP, is a hematologist with a broad background in transfusion medicine, biotherapies, hematology and stem cell biology. He is the executive director of the Connell and O’Reilly Cell Manipulations Core Facility at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass. In this role, Cancelas is responsible for managing a research portfolio on translational and clinical studies involving hemotherapies, stem cell therapies and immune-effector therapies for the treatment of a spectrum of diseases that benefit or may benefit from the application of modified blood-derived therapeutics.

Cancelas’s research program is diverse and has resulted in more than 220 peer-reviewed manuscripts published in high-impact factor journals, including Transfusion, in which he serves as an associate editor. As a researcher, Cancelas leads a federal government-funded group that focuses on translational application of diverse hemotherapies. His translational group has optimized methods of progenitor and granulocyte transfusion in neutropenic patients and validated novel methods to preserve and store platelets, red cells and T cells in clinical multi-center trials. His group has generated first-in-human clinical data for a variety of biological therapies and is now actively searching for the mechanisms that control cold platelet damage and identified key molecular signals and methods to prevent cold storage damage and lyophilized platelets.

Cancelas’s group also studies hematopoiesis and hematopoietic stem cell activity in health and disease. As such, he has been pivotal in the elucidation of the cellular and molecular mechanisms of hematopoietic cells through the Rho family of GTPases. His group provided the basis for understanding of the physiological cell-autonomous and microenvironment/cytokine signaling and metabolic/mitochondrial dependent mechanisms in the context of myeloid progenitor migration and bone marrow retention and the mechanisms that control oncogenic tyrosine kinase signals dependent transformation in leukemic progenitors and identifying specific intrinsic and microenvironment-dependent signaling through Rho GTPases. Through hematopoietic differentiation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) from SCN patients, his laboratory has unveiled the pathogenetic mechanisms of neutropenia in patients with ELANE mutations. Finally, his laboratory has also developed specific methods for the characterization of iPSC from the NHLBI progenitor cell biology consortium and developed/validated new methods for cryopreservation/delivery of functionally active lymphocyte populations in the context of adoptive transfer.