Crystal Mackall, M.D.

Crystal L. Mackall, MD, is the Ernest and Amelia Gallo Family Professor and Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at Stanford University. She serves as the Founding Director of the Stanford Center for Cancer Cell Therapy, Associate Director of the Stanford Cancer Institute, and Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Stanford. For over 30 years, Dr. Mackall has led a world-renowned translational research program in immuno-oncology. Her pioneering work in fundamental immunology has significantly advanced the treatment of human diseases, with a particular focus on pediatric cancers. Dr. Mackall’s group was among the first to demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of CD19 CAR T-cell therapy in children with leukemia, developed a CD22 CAR which mediates impressive activity in CAR19-naïve and CAR19-resistant B-cell malignancies and is leading work demonstrating promising results using GD2 CAR T cells to treat aggressive pediatric brain tumors. Her team was the first to reveal T-cell exhaustion as a key barrier to CAR T-cell efficacy and has devised multiple strategies to enhance the potency of human T cells, spanning anti-exhaustion platforms, logic gates, remote-control designs and multiplexed gene regulation using Cas13d-based RNA technology. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the American Academy of Physicians, a Fellow of the AACR Academy and a Fellow of the Academy of Immuno-oncology. Dr. Mackall co-founded three biotechnology companies focused on cell therapy (Lyell Immunopharma, CARGO Therapeutics, and Link Cell Therapies) and established ACCESSforKIDS, a nonprofit advancing cell therapies for pediatric cancers.