Day 1: Opening Keynote, 9:00 – 09:30 am
Élie Haddad

Élie Haddad, MD, PhD, is Professor of Pediatrics and of Microbiology, Infectious Diseases and Immunology at Université de Montréal, Head of the Immunology, Allergy and Rheumatology Division at CHU Sainte-Justine, and the hospital’s Director of Innovative Therapies, responsible for bringing cell and gene therapy products developed in-house to patients.

His laboratory works across the translational chain, from vector engineering to first-in-human administration. He developed efficient lentiviral transduction of NK cells and designed patented synthetic lineage-specific promoters restricting CAR expression to the T- and NK-cell progeny of transduced hematopoietic stem cells, now extended to in vivo CAR delivery and to gene therapy of primary immune deficiency. He was co-first author of the 2026 New England Journal of Medicine report of the first-in-human prime editing trial, in p47-deficient chronic granulomatous disease, whose first patient worldwide was treated at Sainte-Justine. He currently co-leads an ex vivo lentiviral stem cell gene therapy for MPS type IIID, designed and validated entirely within his institution, now at the pre-CTA stage with Health Canada.

He has published 248 peer-reviewed articles cited over 20,000 times, is a multi-PI of the NIH-funded Primary Immune Deficiency Treatment Consortium, and was the first Canadian elected President of the Clinical Immunology Society.