Bio
Crystal L Mackall MD is the Ernest and Amelia Gallo Family Professor and Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at Stanford University, the Founding Director of the Stanford Center for Cancer Cell Therapy, Co-Leader of the Stanford Cancer Immunotherapy Program and Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy @ Stanford. During a career spanning more than three decades, she has led an internationally recognized translational research program focused on immune-oncology. Her work has advanced understanding of fundamental immunology and translated this understanding for the treatment of human disease with a major focus on children’s cancers. She has led numerous first-in-human and first-in-child clinical trials spanning dendritic cell vaccines, cytokines, and adoptive immunotherapy using NK cells and genetically modified T cells. Her work is credited with identifying an essential role for the thymus in human T cell regeneration (NEJM 1995) and discovering IL-7 as the master regulator of T cell homeostasis (Blood 2001, J Exp Med 2008). Her group was among the first to demonstrate impressive activity of CD19-CAR in pediatric leukemia (Lancet 2015), established the first grading scale and management guidelines for cytokine release syndrome (Blood 2014), and developed CD22-CAR, an effective salvage therapy for CAR19 resistant B cell malignancies (Nat Med 2018, J Clin Onc 2020, Blood 2021, Lancet 2024). She is leading a team demonstrating impressive activity of GD2 targeting CARs for pediatric diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (Nat Med 2018, Nature 2022, Nature 2025), arguably the first data to demonstrate significant activity of CAR T cells in solid cancers. Using both bench-based and patient centered discovery research, she has led globally in defining mechanisms of resistance to T cell immunotherapies and creating and testing next generation platforms engineered to overcome resistance. Her group was the first to identify T cell exhaustion as a major cause of CAR T cell failure (Nat Med 2015), then created the first exhaustion-resistance (Nature 2019) and exhaustion-reversal platforms (Science 2021). Her group discovered a role for mediator kinase in regulating T cell differentiation (Science 2022) and a role for FOXO1 in regulating T cell memory (Nature 2024), implicated macrophage mediated clearance of activated T cells in resistance to cell therapies and created an engineered CD47 to overcome this axis (Nature 2025). Mackall's group uses synthetic biology to engineer safer and more effective cellular therapeutics, including creation of a best-in-class regulatable “remote-controlled” CAR T cell platform (Cell, 2022) and multiplex gene regulation via Cas13d based RNA degradation (Cell, 2024). She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, American Society of Clinical Investigation and American Academy of Physicians and is a fellow of the AACR Academy and the Academy of Immuno-oncology. She was the recipient of the Lloyd Old Award in 2025 for outstanding and innovative research in cancer immunotherapy from the Cancer Research Institute, the Smalley Award in 2021 for outstanding contributions to cancer immunotherapy from the Society for the Immunotherapy of Cancer, the AACR-St.Baldrick’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 2021 for Pediatric Cancer Research, the Nobility in Science Award from the Sarcoma Foundation of America in 2022 and the Edward Netter Leadership Award from the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy in 2023. She has published over 300 manuscripts and her h-index in January 2026 according to google scholar was 120. She has co-founded 3 biotech companies: Lyell Immunopharma, CARGO Therapeutics and Link Cell Therapies as well as ACCESSforKIDS, a non-profit dedicated to commercializing cell therapies for pediatric cancers.
