Lawrence D. Petz, MD
Over 60 years in medicine. Author of the first bone marrow transplant textbook. Founding medical director who built StemCyte's clinical and quality framework.
The physician who built a field
Dr. Lawrence Petz earned his MD from the University of Illinois College of Medicine in 1955 and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Cook County Hospital, San Francisco General Hospital, and the SF VA Hospital. He then completed a fellowship in Hematology at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London, establishing the foundation for a career that would span transfusion medicine, transplantation science, and cord blood banking.
Over the following decades, Dr. Petz held leadership positions at some of the most respected medical institutions in the country. He served as Chief of Medicine at Walker Air Force Base, Section Head of Hematology and Blood Transfusion Services and Chairman of the Division of Medicine at City of Hope Medical Center, and Professor of Pathology and Director of Transfusion Medicine at UCLA Medical Center.
In 2001, Dr. Petz joined StemCyte as its founding Medical Director and Chief Medical Officer. Under his clinical leadership, StemCyte achieved AABB, FACT, and FDA accreditation and developed more than 400 proprietary standard operating procedures, establishing the quality framework that has supported over 2,300 transplants worldwide.
Dr. Petz authored the first textbook on clinical bone marrow transplantation in 1983, co-edited with Karl Blume, a work that helped define the field. He went on to author or co-edit multiple definitive texts including Immune Hemolytic Anemias and Clinical Practice of Transfusion Medicine, and published extensively across hematology, immunohematology, and transplantation science.
From 2003 to 2014, he founded and led the International Symposium on Cord Blood Transplantation at City of Hope, convening faculty from over 20 countries and creating the premier global forum for cord blood science. His screening of more than 18,000 cord blood units for the CCR5δ32 mutation, identifying over 300 HIV-resistant units, directly contributed to the first case of HIV remission in a woman, published in Cell in 2023.
International Cord Blood Symposium
A global gathering of transplant leaders
Dr. Petz founded and organized the annual International Symposium on Cord Blood Transplantation. The symposium convened 31-member faculty from 20+ countries sharing advances in cord blood science and clinical practice.
Undetectable was never the finish line.
Through the NIH-funded IMPAACT P1107 study, Dr. Petz helped pioneer a novel approach: combining a CCR5δ32 cord blood unit with adult stem cells from a relative. By day 100, the patient's immune system was fully reconstituted by cord blood cells. She has remained off antiretroviral therapy with no viral rebound since.
The cord blood unit came from StemCyte's registry—one of over 300 homozygous CCR5δ32 units Dr. Petz had identified by screening more than 18,000 donated units for the HIV-resistant mutation.
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