- Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Leyuan Ma is Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, based at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where he leads the Ma Laboratory for Immune Engineering. He received his BS in biosciences and bioengineering from Shandong Normal University in 2008 and his PhD in molecular, cell and cancer biology from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 2016, completing postdoctoral training before joining CHOP/Penn in 2022.
The Ma laboratory operates at the interface of immunology and engineering, combining genetic, chemistry, computational, and biomaterials tools to decode immune cell crosstalk and engineer next-generation immunotherapies. His group developed a biomaterial-based synthetic vaccine platform — published in Science and Cell — that boosts CAR-T cell efficacy against solid tumors, and he is extending these approaches to engineered Treg therapies and other adoptive cell therapy strategies relevant to autoimmune disease.
Dr. Ma is a member of the Penn Colton Center for Autoimmunity, the Institute for Immunology and Immune Health, and Penn’s broader cell therapy community. He partners with industry and across CHOP/Penn investigators to translate engineered immunotherapy platforms into clinical applications spanning oncology and autoimmunity.