Rate My Professor Charles Sentman

Charles L. Sentman, PhD, serves as Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Dartmouth College's Geisel School of Medicine and Director of the Center for Synthetic Immunity. He earned a PhD from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and a BS from the University of Illinois. His postdoctoral training included research at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis on the role of cell death in T cell development and at the Microbiology and Tumor Biology Center at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on natural killer (NK) cell recognition mechanisms. In 1997, he received a docentur in molecular immunology from Umea University. Sentman joined the medical faculty at Umea Center for Molecular Pathogenesis in 1995, served as team and section leader at AstraZeneca R&D in Lund, Sweden from 1998 to 2001 focusing on pharmaceuticals for respiratory and inflammatory diseases, and joined Dartmouth's Department of Microbiology and Immunology in 2001. He is a member of the Immunology and Cancer Immunotherapy Research Program at the Dartmouth Cancer Center.

Sentman's research centers on innate immunity, NK cells, CD8 T cells, and their regulation of adaptive immunity against cancer and infection. Since 2003, his laboratory has pioneered chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapies, developing NKG2D-based CARs targeting tumors expressing ligands like those on ovarian cancer, lymphoma, myeloma, breast cancer, melanoma, and osteosarcoma. Additional efforts include bi-specific T cell engagers against tumor ligands such as MICA, B7H6, and ULBPs, and CAR Tregs for neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's, ALS, and Parkinson's. Key publications encompass 'NKG2D CAR T cell therapy inhibits the growth of antigen heterogeneous tumors' (2013), 'Phase I Trial of Autologous CAR T Cells Targeting NKG2D Ligands in Patients with AML/MDS and Multiple Myeloma' (2019), 'Human CAR Tregs Targeting SOD1 and Expressing BDNF Reduce Inflammation and Delay Disease in G93A hSOD1-NSG Mice' (2025), and '5xFAD-NSG mice: a preclinical Alzheimer model for human cell therapy studies' (2026). With over 100 peer-reviewed publications and more than 30 issued US patents, Sentman co-founded Oncyte, acquired by Celyad in 2015, and Black Bear Bio, advancing therapies toward clinical development in collaboration with Celdara Medical and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. In 2022, he was named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors for his innovations in immune cell engineering.