Antoni Ribas, MD, PhD, is professor of medicine, surgery, and molecular and medical pharmacology at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), director of the Tumor Immunology Program at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center (JCCC) and director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI) Center at UCLA. He earned his medical degree from the University of Barcelona. He conducted his internship and residency in medical oncology at Hospital Vall d’Hebron, then held a fellowship in Hematology/Oncology at UCLA School of Medicine. He earned his PhD from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Recent work includes laboratory and clinical translational research in adoptive cell transfer therapy with T-cell receptor engineered lymphocytes; examining the antitumor activity of PD-1-blocking antibodies; testing novel targeted therapies blocking oncogenic events in melanoma; and studying primary and acquired resistance to melanoma therapies. He has been instrumental in the clinical development of several agents approved by the FDA, including the first anti-PD-1 pembrolizumab (Keytruda), the anti-CTLA-4 tremelimumab (Imjudo), two combinations of BRAF and MEK inhibitors vemurafenib (Zelboraf) and cobimetinib (Cotellic), dabrafenib (Tafinlar) and trametinib (Mekinist).
He is the recipient of the AACR Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award, the William B. Coley Award from Cancer Research Institute (CRI), the AACR-CRI Lloyd J. Old Award in Cancer Immunology, two NCI Outstanding Investigator Awards and several other awards, and is a Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Buenos Aires and the Free University of Brussels. In 2017, Ribas was ranked #12 of the Highly Cited Researchers of any field by Clarivate Web of Science, was named one of the five Visionaries in Medicine by the New York Times (May 27, 2018) and a 2018 Great Immigrant by the Carnegie Foundation. He is a past president of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), an elected Fellow of the AACR Academy, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians and the US National Academy of Medicine.