Dr. Wolchok is Chief of the Melanoma and Immunotherapeutics Service and holds The Lloyd J. Old Chair in Clinical Investigation at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) with an expertise in the treatment of metastatic melanoma. His additional appointments include: Head of the Swim Across America – Ludwig Collaborative Laboratory; Associate Director of the Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy (LCCI). He has helped establish MSKCC as a leader in the discovery and treatment of cancers with novel immunotherapies.
Dr. Wolchok was instrumental in the clinical development leading to the approval of ipilimumab for advanced melanoma. He is Principal Investigator of numerous ongoing clinical trials at MSKCC in the area of immunotherapy. He supervises an R01-funded basic science laboratory which is focused on investigating novel immunotherapeutic agents in pre-clinical mouse models. In 2011, he established the Immunotherapeutics Clinical Core, a specialized phase 1-2 outpatient unit at MSKCC that is focused on the conduct of novel immunotherapy trials, with a specific emphasis on pharmacodynamic biomarker identification. This group treats patients with a broad spectrum of malignancies.
In 2011, Dr. Wolchok was named director of the Cancer Vaccine Collaborative (CVC), a joint initiative between the Cancer Research Institute (CRI) and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR). The CVC is an international academic clinical trials network dedicated to developing safe and effective therapeutic vaccines and other immunotherapies for cancer. The CVC has conducted nearly 50 early-phase clinical trials of different therapeutic cancer vaccines involving more than 950 patients with melanoma, lung, ovarian, prostate, breast, and other cancers. Most recently, Dr. Wolchok was elected to the ASCO Board of Directors.
Dr. Wolchok has been recognized for his momentous career throughout the years and has received several of awards including the Melanoma Research Foundation – Humanitarian Award in 2010, the Melanoma International Foundation’s Doctor of the Year award in 2012, and the Live, Love, Laugh Foundation and was named the Virginia and Daniel K. Ludwig Chair for Clinical Investigation in 2013. In this year alone, he has been recognized with the American Association for Cancer Research Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Memorial Award and the Giants of Cancer Care in Melanoma Award.