Dan S. Kaufman, MD, PhD

Dan Kaufman, MD, PhD, is a board-certified hematologist who specializes in caring for patients with blood cancers such as leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma. He is one of the physicians with the joint UC San Diego Health / Sharp HealthCare Blood and Marrow Transplantation (BMT) Program, which provides patients with the unique opportunity to receive care from the same physician throughout all phases of blood cancer treatment. This includes initial consultation and diagnosis, treatment to help achieve remission, care during stem cell transplant procedures, and follow-up survivorship care.

Dr. Kaufman's expertise and areas of interest include cell-based immunotherapies, stem cells, regenerative medicine and natural killer (NK) cell-mediated therapy. He offers chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy to adults with relapsed or refractory B-cell lymphoma, a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. CAR T-cell therapy harnesses the patient's own immune cells to recognize and kill cancer cells. It is just one of many types of personalized cancer therapies offered at UC San Diego Health.

Dr. Kaufman is a faculty member in the Division of Regenerative Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine, with the goal of bringing new therapies to clinical trials for diseases caused by injury, age, or degeneration where there is currently no suitable treatment or cure. He directs the cell therapy program, which brings together university and community investigators and national and international collaborators to advance clinical trials of new cell-based therapies.

He also leads a research lab that uses human pluripotent stem cells to understand blood cells and related mesodermal cell populations. Using human pluripotent stem cells, Dr. Kaufman and his colleagues aim to develop new clinical applications for treating relapsed or refractory cancers, including both hematologic malignancies and solid tumors.

Additionally, as a professor in the Department of Medicine, Dr. Kaufman instructs medical students, residents and fellows at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

Dr. Kaufman has co-authored many peer-reviewed articles and his work has appeared in Blood, Journal of Clinical Oncology and Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation, among others. He serves on the editorial board and as a reviewer for numerous medical journals. He also speaks frequently at national and international conferences on topics such as stem cell biology, regenerative medicine, immunotherapy and blood cell development.

Prior to joining UC San Diego Health, Dr. Kaufman served on faculty at University of Minnesota Medical School for 13 years, where he was recently a professor in the Department of Medicine and associate director of the Minnesota Stem Cell Institute.

Dr. Kaufman completed a fellowship in hematology and a residency in internal medicine at University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics. He earned his medical degree from Mayo Medical School and obtained a PhD in immunology at Mayo Graduate School in Rochester, Minnesota. Dr. Kaufman is board certified in hematology.

He is a member of many professional organizations, including the American Society of Hematology, the American Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation, and the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

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For more information, see Blood Cancers and Cancer Care.