Richard Aplenc

Dr. Richard Aplenc is a Professor of Pediatrics in the Department of Pediatrics with a secondary appointment in Biostatistics, Informatics, and Epidemiology in Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and holds the Mai and Harry West Endowed Chair in Pediatric Research. His career has been dedicated to improving outcomes for children with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) through clinical trials, real world data development and analyses, and translational research, including the development of novel therapies. Over his career, he has worked to bridge the gap between clinical care and scientific discovery, building programs that integrate large-scale clinical data with innovative therapeutic strategies to directly benefit pediatric patients.

Dr. Aplenc has held leadership roles in several national and international studies, including serving as co-Chair of the Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Consortium anti-CD33 CAR trial, Principal Investigator of the anti-CD123 CAR trial at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and co-inventor of an anti-CD38 CAR currently in clinical testing. In addition, he led the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) Phase III trial (AAML1031) for children with AML, the largest Phase III pediatric AML trial published to date. Beyond trial leadership, he has contributed to cooperative group efforts through roles such as Vice-Chair of the COG AML Committee and current service on the COG Scientific Council, where he continues to help guide the future of pediatric AML research and therapy.

Research projects: Dr. Aplenc’s research portfolio spans three major areas: real world data analyses, clinical trials, and translational studies. In the real world data space, he co-developed ExtractEHR, a software package for electronic health record data extraction and curation, which is currently in use at nine centers across the United States (US) in a variety of oncology use cases. He is also the co-developer of REAL-AML, a manual chart abstraction based cohort of pediatric patients with acute myeloid leukemia in 17 institutions in the US. His clinical trials work includes leading the COG Phase III AAML1831 trial and developing secondary data sets from COG clinical trials with a particular focus on anthracycline associated cardiac toxicity and leukemia proteogenomics. On the translational side, he applies next-generation sequencing and proteogenomic approaches to identify novel AML cell surface antigens and predict anthracycline associated cardiac toxicity risk, ultimately guiding the development of new immunotherapy targets and precision care strategies for children with AML.