Dr. Leonid Metelitsa is a Professor of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. His research focuses on the role of natural killer T (NKT) cells in tumor immunity and the development of NKT cell-based cancer immunotherapy. He was the first to identify NKT cell infiltration in human primary tumors and its association with favorable clinical outcomes. Dr. Metelitsa pioneered techniques for isolating NKT cells, engineering them with chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), and expanding them at clinical scale. His group led the first-in-human clinical trials of both autologous and allogeneic CAR-NKT cells in patients with neuroblastoma and B-cell malignancies, respectively.