Harold Atkins, MD, FRCPC
Senior Clinician Investigator, Cancer Research,
Ottawa Hospital Research Institute
Physician, Transplant and Cell Therapy Program, The Ottawa Hospital
Associate Professor, Clinical Hematology, University of Ottawa

Dr. Harold Atkins is a physician of The Ottawa Hospital Transplant and Cell Therapy Program, an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Ottawa, and a senior clinical investigator at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute Cancer Research Program.

He received his Bachelor of Medical Science degree and Medical Degree from the University of Ottawa followed by a rotating internship year at the Victoria General Hospital in Victoria BC. Specialty training in Internal Medicine was done at the University of Ottawa. Clinical and research fellowships in Hematology, Stem Cell Transplantation and Experimental Hematology followed at the University of Washington and at the Ontario Cancer Institute.

He specializes in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and has spearheaded the use of stem cell transplantation for immune repair to treat patients with severe autoimmune diseases including multiple sclerosis, scleroderma, myasthenia gravis and others. The outcome of a trial using autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation to treat multiple sclerosis was published in the Lancet in 2016. He ran a clinical trial exploring the role of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in preventing organ transplant rejection. He is a member of a BiocanRx funded, pan-Canadian consortium to develop and improve the accessibility of new chimeric antigen receptor T lymphocytes for the treatment of hematological cancers. He was awarded the OHRI’s Dr. Michel Chretien Researcher of the Year in 2016, the Till and McCulloch Award from the Stem Cell Network in 2017 and was the co-recipient of the Canadian Blood Services Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.