Rafet Basar, MD

Rafet Basar is a postdoctoral fellow at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He has been working to expand what might be possible in cell-based therapies to help not only cancer patients, but also patients with certain autoimmune diseases.

Basar received his MD degree in Turkey in 2009 and completed his residency in internal medicine at the Istanbul Faculty of Medicine in 2015. Following his clinical training, he began research training as a postdoctoral research fellow in Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapy Department in the Division of Cancer Medicine under the mentorship of Katayoun Rezvani, MD, PhD, to focus on adoptive cellular therapy and cancer immunology.

Throughout his postdoctoral career at MD Anderson Cancer Center, his work has been dedicated to developing innovative methods to enhance the potency of NK cellular therapy products using state-of-the-art genetic engineering strategies for the treatment of hematologic malignancies. He has also focused on engineering cytotoxic T cells to treat post-transplant viral infections and characterizing B cells for the purpose of viable expansion and suppression along with their role in the tumor milieu. Basar has developed a novel strategy combining chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) engineering with CRISPR Cas9 multiplex gene editing to knock out multiple inhibitory molecules such as TGFBRII, CISH and NKG2A simultaneously in order to generate highly potent cells for cancer immunotherapy.