Dr. Kaufman has been a Professor at the University of California-San Diego since 2016 in the Department of Medicine, Divisions of Regenerative Medicine and BMT. At UCSD, he does clinical work in hematology/BMT. He also oversees the UCSD Advanced Cell Therapy Laboratory (ACTL) that provides GMP cell manufacturing to translate new cell-based therapies to clinical trials.

Research in the Kaufman lab pioneered the use of human pluripotent stem cells to understand the development of blood and immune cells. Our group developed the ability to derive and utilize human iPSC-derived natural killer (NK) cells to kill diverse types of human cancer cells. These studies have used cellular engineering to enhance the anti-tumor activity of the iPSC-derived NK cells. This work has been translated into clinical trials for treatment of relapsed/refractory cancers- both hematologic malignancies and solid tumors. More recent studies have developed novel targeted virus-like particles for in vivo engineering of immune cells (T cells, NK cells and macrophages) to express CARs that mediate anti-tumor activity.