Mark Yarmarkovich

Faculty | NYU School of Medicine

Dr. Mark Yarmarkovich leads a laboratory focused on expanding the curative potential of immunotherapy to patients with solid tumors. He pioneered peptide-centric (PC)-CAR T cells, a new class of engineered cell therapies that enable precise targeting of tumor-specific intracellular drivers previously considered inaccessible to conventional drugs or immunotherapies (Nature, 2023). PC-CARs eradicate aggressive cancers in preclinical models and dramatically expand the range of targets amenable to CAR T cell therapy. The first PC-CAR is currently being evaluated in a first-in-class clinical trial, with additional programs advancing toward clinical translation. His laboratory has also developed scalable technologies to systematically discover tumor-specific targets across cancer types and engineer matched CAR receptors, creating one of the largest resources of actionable cancer-specific antigens to date. Together, these platforms aim to make highly personalized cancer immunotherapies broadly accessible. Dr. Yarmarkovich is a Faculty member at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and a member of the Perlmutter Cancer Center. He is a co-founder of two biotechnology companies translating PC-CAR technologies to the clinic and an inventor on more than 15 patent filings in cancer immunotherapy. His work has been recognized with the NIH Director's New Innovator Award, the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovator Award, the Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Prize, and the STAT Wunderkind Award.