Alex Marson

Alex Marson is an American biologist, specializing in genetics, human immunology, and CRISPR genome engineering. He is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he leads research at the Marson Lab.

He is best known for his work with Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR), specifically for his advances in furthering understanding of the genomics of human T cell function. Marson also currently holds affiliations with the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, and the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI).

Marson's team is pioneering new CRISPR gene editing technologies that aim to offer faster, cheaper and more precise ways to re-write DNA programs in human immune cells. With these tools, the lab is engineering cells to treat a wide range of diseases. They are designing programs to make cells that can recognize and eliminate cancer, cells that are resistant to infections like HIV, and cells that can reduce inflammation in autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. Reprogrammed human immune cells are emerging as a new class of “living” medicines.

Alex Marson was born June 5, 1979 in Manhattan, NY.He is the son of Ellen Marson, a Professor of Spanish literature and former director of Hadassah, and Bernard Marson, an architect. Marson received an A.B. in biology summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2001. He received a master's degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 2003. Marson received a Ph.D. in Biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008, under the guidance of Rick Young and Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute. He researched how various cell types, regulatory T cells and embryonic stem cells, can form unique identities and can potentially be used in regenerative medicine.

Marson received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 2010. He was a resident at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, and completed clinical training in Infectious Diseases at UCSF. He started his lab as a UCSF Sandler Faculty Fellow in 2013.

Marson's research focuses on reprogramming human immune cells, especially T cells, with CRISPR. The applications of this research are in the treatment of cancer, autoimmune diseases, HIV and a wide range of other diseases. In August 2018, Marson was nominated as a Wired Magazine "Icon" along with Sean Parker for his research in DNA programming and genome editing for cancer immunotherapy.

Marson is the scientific director for biomedicine at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI). He is a member of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and was selected as one of the inaugural Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigators.

• 2016 - American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI) Young Physician-Scientist Award
• 2016 - Burroughs Wellcome Foundation Career Award for Medical Scientists
• 2016 - NIDA/NIH Avenir New Innovator Award
• 2016 - Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Project Member
• 2017 - Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator
• 2018 - Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Member
• 2018 - Wired “Icon” of the Future
• 2019 – Wall Street Journal Future of Everything Speaker