Our Science – Feldman Website

Steven A. Feldman, Ph.D.

Surgery Branch Staff Scientist (Facility Head) National Cancer Institute Building 10 - Hatfield CRC, Room 3-5760 10 Center Drive Bethesda, MD 20892-1201 Phone:   301-496-4269 Fax:   301-451-6949 E-Mail:   feldmanst@mail.nih.gov

Biography

Dr. Feldman received his B.A., M.P.H., and Ph.D. from Univesity of California, Berkeley. As a National Reseach Council fellow, he studied mechanisms of viral entry at the FDA's Centers for Biologics Evaluation and Research followed by an addtional NIH fellowhsip investigating the mechanisms of retroviral entry into host cells. Dr. Feldman then spent three years at a leading biotechnology company as the Senior Scientist in charge of process development for the manufacturing of viral vectors and vaccines before coming back to the Surgery Branch of the National Cancer Institute to establish a new Retro/Lentiviral Vector Core Facility.

Research

The NCI Surgery Branch Vector Production Facility is charged with producing clinical grade retroviral vectors in support of our clinical trials. The majority of patients with advanced metastatic cancer now enrolled in clinical trials in the Surgery Branch have failed conventional and most experimental treatments including chemotherapy, high-dose IL-2 treatment, vaccination with tumor antigen peptides and recombinant viruses that encode tumor antigens, as well as adoptive transfer of autologous tumor reactive T cells. Overall, despite all of these intensive treatment options, durable responses have only been observed in a limited number of patients, demonstrating the urgent need for the development of new and more effective cancer treatments. The clinical reagents produced in the Surgery Branch Vector Production Facility will be used for expressing anti-cancer genes within immune cells for use in cancer immunotherapy trials. These trials will allow the evaluation of the effectiveness of genetically engineered human T lymphocytes and other cells of the immune system to express anti-cancer genes and cause tumor regression in patients enrolled in our cancer immunotherapy trials.

This page was last updated on 9/9/2008.