Nicholas Restifo

Dr. Restifo has focused his efforts for the past three decades on developing novel immunotherapies using T cells to eradicating advanced, metastatic cancer. For the past two years, he has been working at a startup called Medici Therapeutics based in Boston, where he serves as Chief Medical Officer. He received in MD from New York University and post-doctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He was recruited to the National Cancer Institute where he rose through the ranks to become a Principal Investigator, and head of the NCI’s Center of Excellence in Immunology. He was also the first solo recipient of an intramural ‘Cancer Moonshot’ award. His contributions to the field include: Defining the qualities of highly effective anti-tumor T cells; identifying the genes that are required for successful immunotherapy; experimentally showing how ‘tumor escape’ functions in human tumors; elucidating the mechanisms that enable the activation and inhibition of anti-tumor T cells; and understanding the impact of host factors in cancer immunotherapy. He was the first to demonstrate what are now considered ‘core understandings’ that have been key in efforts to develop cancer treatments worldwide. These efforts are documented in 364 papers that have been cited over 121,000 times according to Google Scholar (with an h-index of 164). He has written and published two dozen book chapters on cancer immunotherapy. His work has impacted on virtually every component of modern immunotherapy that is curative of metastatic cancer and has transformed cancer medicine. He has received many awards including the Solomon A Berson Medical Achievement Award for Clinical and Translational Science and was cited by Thomson Reuters as one of the “World’s most influential scientific minds.”