Marcel van den Brink is a physician scientist and medical oncologist who performs both laboratory and clinical research related to allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (BMT) and immuno-oncology. He is a globally recognized leader in the basic and translational science of bone marrow transplantation (BMT), the microbiome and cancer immunotherapy. Dr. van den Brink is president of City of Hope Los Angeles and National Medical Center, chief physician executive and the Deana and Steve Campbell Chief Physician Executive Distinguished Chair. Before he joined City of Hope, Dr. van den Brink served in leadership positions at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for 24 years, most recently as the Alan N. Houghton Chair in Immunology and the head of the Division of Hematologic Malignancies. He is also the Vice Chairman of the Board of DKMS, an international nonprofit organization devoted to bone marrow donor registration.
As Chair of the Medical Board, he reorganized DKMS, which is now the largest global BMT donor registry and enables 40% of all unrelated allograft donations worldwide.

As a clinical scientist, Dr. van den Brink is involved in immunotherapeutic trials of cytokines, cell therapies, as well as  strategies to manipulate the intestinal microbiome for patients with hematologic malignancies. His laboratory is devoted to the immunology of BMT, and he studies immune reconstitution, pathophysiology of graft-versus-host disease, the intestinal microbiota, and chimeric antigen receptor T cells in patients and preclinical models. Dr. van den Brink is an international leader whose research bridges microbiome, bone marrow transplantation (BMT), hematological malignancies, and immunotherapy of cancer. In 2022, ASTCT & CIBMTR awarded him the E. Donnall Thomas Award, the most prestigious honor in the field of BMT. In 2009, he was the first to perform (pre)clinical studies regarding the role of the intestinal microbiome in BMT. These studies have found wide acclaim, for example: a) Enterococcus and GVHD (Science 2019) was profiled in NEJM (Garrett WS, NEJM 2020), and b) Intestinal microbiota diversity in BMT patients (NEJM 2020) was highlighted by the NCI Director as one of the most important studies in 2020. In addition, he has performed innovative (pre)clinical studies regarding thymic regeneration and graft-vs-host disease resulting in several clinical trials. As a laboratory Principal Investigator, he mentors junior faculty members, hematology oncology fellows, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate students.