Bio
Adrienne H. Long, MD, PhD is an instructor in the Division of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford. Dr. Long attend Northwestern University, where she earned both her BS in biomedical engineering and her MD. Determined to help develop novel treatments for pediatric cancer patients, she took time during medical school to pursue a PhD at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where she helped advance CAR T cell therapies with Dr. Crystal Mackall. Her influential thesis work was the first to identify T cell exhaustion as a critical factor limiting efficacy of CAR therapies (Long et al., Nature Medicine, 2015), and also identified novel methods to enhance CAR therapies for pediatric solid tumor patients (Long/Highfill et al., Cancer Immunology Research, 2016). Dr. Long went on to complete her pediatrics residency training at Boston Children’s Hospital, where she continued her research in cancer immunology with Dr. Nicholas Haining – this time focusing on strategies to enhance antigen presentation to augment checkpoint blockade (Long et al. Keystone Symposium on Cancer Immunotherapy, 2019). She completed her pediatric oncology fellowship at Stanford, and remains dedicated to a career as a physician-scientist focused on developing novel immunotherapies for children with cancer. She is currently conducting her post-doctoral research with Dr. Mark Davis, studying how thymic selection, designed to prevent auto-immunity, may also inhibit antitumor immunity in children.
