Two National Institutes of Health (NIH) inventors, Drs. Steven Rosenberg and John O’Shea, have been selected as part of the 2025 National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellows. NAI Fellowship is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to inventors.

The National Academy of Inventors is a member organization comprising U.S. and international universities, and governmental and non-profit research institutes, with over 4,000 individual inventor members and Fellows spanning more than 250 institutions. The 2025 Fellows hail from 135 research universities, governmental and non-profit research institutions worldwide and their work spans across various disciplines. They are not only phenomenal researchers holding prestigious honors and distinctions but are also incredible inventors who collectively hold over 5,000 issued U.S. patents and whose innovations are making significant tangible societal and economic impacts today and will well into the future.

Steven Rosenberg, M.D., Ph.D., is the Chief of the Surgery Branch at the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute. Dr. Rosenberg is often regarded as the father of cancer immunotherapy as he began working on immunotherapy in the 1970s when little was known about T lymphocyte function in cancer. In the late 1980s, he began working on advancing the usage of T cells as immunotherapy, specifically the use of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. This work resulted in multiple patents that are foundational in the CAR T space. Dr. Rosenberg pioneered the development of immunotherapy that has resulted in the first effective immunotherapies for selected patients with advanced cancer. His basic and clinical studies of interleukin-2 directly resulted in the approval of this immunotherapy by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of patients with metastatic melanoma and renal cancer, many of whom remain disease-free over 25 years after treatment. His studies of cell transfer immunotherapy using tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) that resulted in durable complete remissions in patients with metastatic melanoma were the first to directly demonstrate the effective role of T lymphocyte in human cancer immunotherapy and the approach has now been applied to the treatment of patients with metastatic solid cancers. He pioneered the development of gene therapy and was the first to successfully insert foreign genes into humans. He was the first to demonstrate the clinical effectiveness of genetically engineered CAR T-cells to mediate the regression of B-cell malignancies in humans, a treatment now approved by the FDA for widespread use. In recent work, Dr. Rosenberg established new approaches for the application of immunotherapy to patients with a variety of common solid epithelial cancers by targeting the unique mutations present in the patient’s cancer. This recent work has resulted in the regression of metastatic cancer in patients with melanoma, sarcomas and lymphomas.

He holds an extraordinary 884 patents; 135 US and 749 foreign. Dr. Rosenberg has published over 1200 papers in peer-reviewed literature and co-authored more than 30 books. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research, received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by the President of the United States, and is now a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. Dr. Rosenberg was an NIH Distinguished Lecturer for the 12th Annual Philip S. Chen, Jr., Ph.D., Distinguished Lecture on Innovation and Technology Transfer hosted by the NIH. His talk was on Cells as Anti-Cancer Drugs: Entering Mainstream Oncology. If you are interested in working with Dr. Rosenberg, you can find the technologies he has available for licensing or collaboration on the NIH Technology Transfer website.  

John J. O’Shea, M.D., is a Senior Investigator and Chief of the Molecular Immunology and Inflammation Branch of the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS). Dr. O’Shea is a leading inventor in the field of cytokine signal transduction, specifically in dissecting the role of the Janus kinases (JAKs) and signal transducers and activators of transcription (STATs) family transcription in immunoregulation. Dr. O'Shea discovered and cloned the tyrosine kinase, JAK3, which is essential for inducing the cascade of effects caused by immune system molecules called cytokines, including one known as interleukin-1 (IL-2), and demonstrated its role in pathogenesis of severe combined immunodeficiency. Dr. O'Shea identified the role of STAT3 in regulating T cell cytokine production in Job's syndrome. More recently, Dr. O’Shea’s laboratory has employed deep sequencing to understand the epigenetic regulation of T cell differentiation and the role of STATs in these processes.

There are now 11 approved JAK inhibitors for multiple forms of arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, dermatologic disorders, and COVID-19. He has been elected to the Association of American Physicians, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the National Academy of Medicine, and is now a National Academy of Inventors Fellow. Dr. O’Shea was an NIH Distinguished Lecturer for the 11th Annual Philip S. Chen, Jr., Ph.D., Distinguished Lecture on Innovation and Technology Transfer hosted by the NIH. His talk was on Cytokine Signaling: Genes, Genomes and Drugs.