- Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Marco Ruella is Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology-Oncology at the Perelman School of Medicine and Scientific Director of the Lymphoma Program at the Abramson Cancer Center. He received his MD from the University of Torino in Italy and completed hematology specialization training in Torino before joining Penn for postdoctoral and faculty training in cellular immunotherapy.
The Ruella laboratory studies the mechanisms of response and resistance to chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, with foundational contributions to understanding antigen loss, tumor escape, and CAR-T persistence. He co-founded viTToria Biotherapeutics, advancing next-generation CAR-T constructs including the VIPER-001 program, and his discoveries are broadly relevant to the emerging application of CAR-T to autoimmune disease.
An elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, Dr. Ruella is one of the world’s leading translational CAR-T scientists. He partners with Penn Colton Center colleagues, the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies, and industry to extend CAR-T platforms from oncology into the autoimmune setting, where mechanistic lessons from cancer immunotherapy are reshaping the treatment of severe autoimmune disease.
