Richard J. O'Reilly, MD

Richard J. O’Reilly, MD is an Emeritus Member and former Chair of the Department of Pediatrics and Chief of the Pediatric and Adult Bone Marrow Transplantation Services at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. As Chief, Dr. O'Reilly pioneered transplantation approaches for patients who lack HLA matched siblings. He and his colleagues introduced the use of marrow transplants from matched unrelated donors and thereafter T-cell depleted transplants from HLA half matched donors for children with lethal immune deficiencies and both children and adults with leukemia. In 1994, he introduced adoptive therapy with T-cells from immune donors to treat and eradicate EBV lymphomas complicating marrow transplants, and subsequently demonstrated the potential of banked third party donor-derived EBV and CMV specific T-cells generated in vitro and characterized as to their viral peptide specificity and HLA restriction, to induce durable remissions of EBV+ lymphomas and drug-resistant CMV infections both in marrow and solid organ transplant recipients. His laboratory most recently had been exploring the potential of adoptive cell therapies employing virus-specific T-cells genetically modified to express a tumor-targeted chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) to treat or prevent recurrence of leukemia following transplantation. Dr. O’Reilly is currently a member of the Board of the Ronald McDonald House New York. He has received several honors for his work and is the author or co-author of over 450 articles in the fields of bone marrow transplantation and transplantation immunology.