Career
van den Brink obtained his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Leiden, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute in Pittsburgh, PA and residency at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC. From 1994 to 1997, van den Brink was a Clinical Fellow in Hematology and Oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a Clinical Fellow in Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. He then carried out a post-doctoral fellowship at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA from 1995 to 1999.
From 1999 to 2023, he served at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center as chief of the Adult Bone Marrow Transplantation Service and subsequently as Head of the Division of Hematologic Malignancies. [2] He was also Alan Houghton Chair in Immunology [3] at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and Professor at Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences [4] and Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. From 2015 to 2022, he was the Co-Director [5] of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at MSK. [6]
Currently, he is President of City of Hope Los Angeles and National Medical Center, Chief Physician Executive and Deana and Steve Campbell Distinguished Chair. [7]
He is Vice Chairman of DKMS Stiftung Leben Spenden Foundation Board and Chairman of the DKMS Medical Council. [8] He is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation [9] and the Association of American Physicians. He has been elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, or KNAW) as a Foreign Member of Medical, Biomedical and Health Sciences. [10] KNAW Members consist of leading scientists across all disciplines and are chosen for their scientific achievements. [11]
Research
As a physician-scientist, van den Brink studies cancer immunotherapy with a special interest in intestinal microbiome, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy, and thymic regeneration.
Van den Brink has made a large number of discoveries regarding the role of the thymus in immune reconstitution after bone marrow transplantation, [12] the pathophysiology of graft-versus-host disease [13] and how changes in the gut flora can affect bone marrow transplantation. [14] From years of research on the relationship between microbiota and GVHD, [15] he has discovered that antibiotic treatment slows down regrowth of immune cells after transplant by depleting gut flora, [16] lactose in the diet feeds dangerous gut bacteria when the immune system is compromised in mice, [17] and a bacterial species called Blautia producta can prevent infections and GVHD in bone marrow transplantation patients. [18] He has published over 200 articles [19] that have helped improve therapeutic strategies for cancer patients.
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