MD
Professor
Co-Leader, UNC Lineberger Immunology Research Program
UNC-Chapel Hill
Immunology and Immunotherapy Research Program
Area of Interest
Gianpietro Dotti, MD, is a research professor of microbiology and immunology at UNC and director of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center Immunotherapy Program. Dotti received his medical degree at the University of Milan in Milan, Italy, in 1989 with subsequent clinical training and board certification in hematology at the University of Parma in Parma, Italy, in 1995. From 1996 to 1999, he completed a research fellowship in molecular biology at Ospedali Riuniti di Bergamo in Bergamo, Italy, where he developed technologies to detect minimal residual disease in hematological malignancies and studied molecular mechanisms of post-transplant lymphomas. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in translation research at the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
In 2002, he joined the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy at Baylor initially as an instructor and then ranking all the academic positions up to professor with tenure in 2014. It was there that Dotti studied immunotherapy strategies to treat patients with hematologic malignancies including lymphomas and leukemia. In particular, he developed the program of the CD19-specific chimeric antigen receptor in that institution and cloned a novel chimeric antigen receptor targeting the light chain of human immunoglobulins. Dotti was also involved in developing CAR-based strategies to target neuroblastoma in pediatric patients. In collaboration with Brenner he also developed the clinical phase of a novel safety switch for T-cells based on the human caspase-9. Dotti is continuing his research at UNC with particular interest in developing CAR-T cells for the treatment of solid tumors.
Awards and Honors
- Highly Cited Researchers (Top 1%), Web of Science, Clarivate Analytics, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
News and Stories
UNC Lineberger researchers among world’s most influential in Clarivate 2025 Highly Cited Researchers list
Eleven UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center members were named as 2025 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate for publishing some of the most influential scientific papers during the past decade.
UNC researchers unlock new way to help fight skin cancer
Researchers found that inhibiting a problematic protein in the body helps immunotherapies and CAR-T therapy to better fight off melanoma.
