2017 IO Featured Talks » CTLA-4 Blockade as Treatment for Relapse after Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplantation



CTLA-4 Blockade as Treatment for Relapse after Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplantation

Ted Ball, MD
UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center

Part 1


Part 2






Edward Ball, MD
Professor of Medicine, Chief, Blood and Marrow Transplant Division
Program Director, UCSD/Sharp and Rady Children's Hospital Blood and Marrow Transplant Program
UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center


Dr. Edward (Ted) D. Ball received his M.D. from the Case Western Reserve University School (CWRU) of Medicine in 1976. After completing his internal medicine residency he trained in Hematology/Oncology at CWRU and Dartmouth Medical School. During his fellowship training, Dr. Ball became interested in the emerging field of monoclonal antibody production for diagnostics and therapeutics. After joining the Dartmouth faculty, he developed several candidate therapeutic antibodies and applied them to another emerging therapy, autologous bone marrow transplant (BMT). He developed several clinical trials testing the idea that occult leukemia cells could be “purged” from the bone marrow in vitro, thus allowing transplantation of bone marrow back into a patient following myeloablative chemotherapy. He also explored the concept of direct intravenous administration of both monospecific and bispecific antibodies in experimental clinical trials for AML patients.

Dr. Ball left Dartmouth in 1991 to become Professor of Medicine and the Chief of the Hematology and Bone Marrow Transplant division at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He then was recruited to UCSD to head the BMT Division in 1998. He continued his work with therapeutic monoclonal antibodies including the development of a clinical trial focusing on the problem of relapse of malignant disease after allogeneic stem cell transplant using a novel checkpoint inhibitor, ipilimumab (now FDA-approved for treatment of malignant melanoma). This first clinical trial of a checkpoint inhibitor in the setting of allogeneic transplant was successful in showing that the antibody was safe and led to remissions in a subset of patients. Based on this, a larger multi-center clinical trial was initiated. The initial results of this trial were recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine (375(2):143-53, 2016).

Dr. Ball has published over 250 journal articles and book chapters in the fields of monoclonal antibody development, stem cell transplantation and leukemia biology. He has been an officer in several professional societies and a Scholar of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. /p>