Leadership

Ayad Hamdan, M.D.

Division Chief
Professor of Medicine

Ayad Hamdan, MD, is a board-certified hematologist who specializes in treating people with cancers of the blood and lymph system, including lymphoma, multiple myeloma, leukemia, myeloproliferative neoplasms and myelodysplastic syndromes. He offers chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy to adults with relapsed or refractory B-cell lymphoma, a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. CAR T-cell therapy harnesses the patient's own immune cells to recognize and kill cancer cells. It is just one of many types of personalized cancer therapies offered at UC San Diego Health.

As a physician in UC San Diego Health's Blood and Marrow Transplant Program, Dr. Hamdan provides comprehensive blood and marrow transplant services, including autologous and allogeneic stem cell transplantation for all hematologic malignancies, with a focus on B cell Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and Hodgkin's lymphoma. In addition, Dr. Hamdan's clinical expertise and research interests include apheresis (stem cell collections), clinical innovation and quality improvement.

In 2023, Dr. Hamdan was appointed as physician-in-chief of Moores Cancer Center and cancer services, overseeing clinical operations and all related inpatient and outpatient oncology services at UC San Diego Health as well as operations with affiliates and outreach clinics.

As a professor in the Department of Medicine, he trains medical students, residents and fellows at UC San Diego School of Medicine. Dr. Hamdan has co-authored numerous articles and his work has appeared in medical and research publications, including Blood Journal, Lancet Hematology, Transfusion, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Journal of Immunotherapy and the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Prior to joining UC San Diego Health, Dr. Hamdan was an attending physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, in Boston. He was also the site investigator for the HIV/AIDS Malignancy Consortium (a National Cancer Institute-supported clinical trials group) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, as well as the medical director for apheresis and infusion services.

Dr. Hamdan completed a fellowship in hematology and oncology through the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Harvard Medical School program and his residency in internal medicine at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He holds a medical degree from the American University of Beirut Medical Center in Beirut, Lebanon. He is board certified in hematology and internal medicine.

Dr. Hamdan is a member of the American Society of Apheresis, American Society of Hematology and American Medical Association.

He is fluent in Arabic.

Dimitrios Tzachanis, M.D., PhD

Clinical Service Chief
Professor of Medicine

Dr. Tzachanis is a Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Division of Blood and Marrow Transplantation (BMT) at UC San Diego.  He is currently the Clinical Service Chief for BMT as recognized by the Department of Medicine and the Clinical Director of the BMT program as recognized by the joint program between UC San Diego and Sharp Healthcare. Dr Tzachanis is an expert in the field of hematologic malignancies and stem cell transplantation. His clinical and research interests lie primarily in cancer immunology and immunotherapy. He has published more than sixty peer-reviewed articles in prestigious medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, Blood, Nature Immunology, and Bone Marrow Transplantation, among others. He has been trained as a FACT inspector and is a panel member of the NCCN guidelines for hematopoietic cell transplantation.