- Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology, NYU Grossman School of Medicine / NYU Langone Health
Dr. Mark Yarmarkovich leads a laboratory at NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center focused on developing next-generation precision immunotherapies. His group pioneered peptide-centric (PC)-CAR T cells — a technology that enables targeting of disease drivers long considered undruggable, including intracellular transcription factors and other antigens presented exclusively as MHC-bound peptides on the cell surface. The first PC-CAR T cell therapy to emerge from this work is currently being evaluated in a clinical trial for high-risk neuroblastoma, with additional programs advancing across cancer types.
Dr. Yarmarkovich’s lab is now extending this platform beyond oncology to autoimmune disease. The same tools developed to identify tumor-specific antigens are being redirected to interrogate the targets that underpin autoimmunity — mapping the specific immune cell populations and autoantigens that drive disease, and translating those findings into therapies that either eliminate pathogenic immune cells or deploy antigen-specific CAR regulatory T cells to suppress aberrant immune responses.
Dr. Yarmarkovich received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and previously conducted research at Genentech before joining NYU. He is a co-founder of two biotechnology companies and the inventor on more than 15 immunotherapy patent filings. His work has been recognized with the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award, the Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Prize, and the STAT Wunderkind Award.
