Dr. Donald B. Kohn receives the American Society of Gene + Cell Therapy Founders Award

Congratulations to Dr. Donald B. Kohn for receiving the Founders Award from the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy. The ASGCT Founders Award recognizes a pioneering contributor to the gene and cell therapy field. It is among the Society’s highest honors and the recipient presents a keynote lecture highlighting their accomplishments that led to the award.

Dr. Kohn is a pediatric bone marrow transplant physician who focuses on developing blood stem cell gene therapies for genetic disorders including sickle cell disease and primary immunodeficiencies. Kohn is credited with the development of one of the first successful blood stem cell gene therapies targeting adenosine deaminase–deficient severe combined immunodeficiency, or ADA-SCID. Dr. Kohn’s therapy for the condition, in which babies are born without an immune system and often do not survive past the first two years of life, has cured more than 50 babies to date. He was also the first researcher to perform a gene transfer into CD34+ cells from umbilical cord blood in a clinical trial for ADA-SCID and the first in the United States to initiate clinical trials of a gene therapy for pediatric HIV/AIDS using bone marrow stem cells.