Sanford Advanced Therapy Center
The Sanford Advanced Therapy Center provides leading-edge services for the development, testing, and GMP production of innovative therapy products for IND-enabling and early-phase clinical trials.
Leadership
Co-Director Dan Kaufman, M.D., Ph.D., is a professor of medicine in the School of Medicine’s Division of Regenerative Medicine, director of Cell Therapy at the School of Medicine, and co-director of the Sanford Advanced Therapy Center (SATC) at the Sanford Stem Cell Institute, all at UC San Diego. 
A native of Minnesota, Dr. Kaufman completed his undergraduate work at Stanford University and his M.D. and Ph.D. at the Mayo Medical School and Mayo Graduate School in Rochester, Minnesota. He completed both residency training in internal medicine and a fellowship training in hematology at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
Dr. Kaufman was a faculty member at the University of Minnesota from 2002 through 2016. In 2016, he moved to San Diego to serve as a professor in the UC San Diego School of Medicine’s divisions of regenerative medicineand blood and marrow transplantation.
At UC San Diego, Dr. Kaufman performs clinical work in hematology and blood and marrow transplantation.. He also oversees the SATC’s Advanced Cell Therapy Laboratory, which provides good manufacturing practice cell manufacturing to translate new cell-based therapies to clinical trials.
Research in the Kaufman Lab uses human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to understand the development of blood and immune cells. Recent studies have focused on the ability to use 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 by expression of novel chimeric antigen receptors, stabilized expression of CD16, and other strategies. This work has now been translated into clinical trials for treatment of relapsed/refractory cancers, both hematologic malignancies and solid tumors. Additional studies aim to develop novel approaches for in vivo cell engineering to provide a potentially more efficient strategy to produce targeted cell-based cancer therapies.
Co-Director Karen Christman, Ph.D., is a professor in the Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering, the associate dean for Faculty Affairs and Welfare, and the Pierre Galletti Endowed Chair for Bioengineering Innovation at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. 
Dr. Christman received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2000 and her Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of California San Francisco and Berkeley Joint Bioengineering Graduate Group, where she examined in situ approaches to myocardial tissue engineering. She was a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Los Angeles in the fields of polymer chemistry and nanotechnology.
Dr. Christman joined the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering’s Department of Bioengineering in 2007 and is co-director of the Sanford Advanced Therapy Center in the UC San Diego Sanford Stem Cell Institute. Her lab, housed in the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, focuses on developing novel biomaterials for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications. It has a strong translational focus, with the main goal of developing minimally invasive therapies for cardiovascular disease and women’s health.
Dr. Christman is a fellow of the American Heart Association, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the Biomedical Engineering Society, the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has received several awards, including the NIH Director’s New Innovator and Transformative Research awards, the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation Early Career Translational Research Award, the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society’s Young Investigator and Senior Scientist awards, the Society for Biomaterials Clemson Award for Applied Research, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Professional Impact Award for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. She is also a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors and a co-founder of Ventrix, Inc., and Karios Technologies, Inc.