Assistant Attending
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Lauren Banks, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Attending on the Sarcoma Medical Oncology and Cellular Therapeutic Services at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), having trained as a medical oncology fellow at MSKCC in New York City. She is in the laboratory of Christopher Klebanoff, MD, and is under the clinical mentorship of Sandra D’Angelo, MD. Dr. Banks’s research is focused on cancer neoantigen discovery, with a goal to develop and clinically translate novel engineered TCR-based therapies for sarcomas, focusing on translocation-associated histologies.
Dr. Banks graduated from Stanford in 2007 with honors with a Bachelor of Science in biological sciences and a minor in African and African American Studies. Following college, Dr. Banks spent a year at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, as part of the Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award program, during which time she studied vaccine strategies for avian influenza in the laboratory of Dr. Kanta Subbarao, MBBS, MPH. She received her MD and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016, completing her thesis work in the laboratory of Gary Koretzky, MD, PhD. She moved to Boston, Massachusetts where she continued training as an internal medicine resident at Massachusetts General Hospital. During residency, she was mentored by Ryan Sullivan, MD, a melanoma oncologist. It was there that her interest in immunotherapy and ways to improve how the immune system is used to treat solid tumors flourished. Dr. Banks completed her residency training in 2019, after which she joined the Medical Oncology/Hematology Fellowship Training Program at MSKCC. Under the mentorship of Drs. Klebanoff and D’Angelo, she discovered T cell receptors that specifically target the fusion that drives a rare sarcoma, Desmoplastic Small Round Cell Tumor. Work that she is continuing as an Assistant Attending on the Sarcoma Medical Oncology Service at MSK.
