Craig B. Thompson (born 1953) is an American cell biologist and a former president of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

After completing his training, Thompson became a physician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and an assistant professor of medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

[2] In his earlier work, Thompson was among the first to describe the unique co-stimulatory properties of CD28 in augmenting lymphoid effector function, proliferation, and survival.

[12][13][14][15] His work has also led to new insights into how intracellular metabolite levels can contribute to the regulation of gene expression, cellular differentiation and oncogenic transformation.

[20][21][22] Thompson's work with Stanley Korsmeyer establishing the existence of three classes of Bcl-2-related proteins and defining their role in apoptosis led to the development of ABT-263 (navitoclax) and ABT-199 (venetoclax), recently FDA-approved for certain patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).

[citation needed] Thompson's discovery of oncogenic metabolites (succinate, fumarate, and 2-hydroxyglutarate) that can inhibit tumor suppressor function and/or impair cellular differentiation has helped lead to the development of new treatments for leukemia, gliomas, sarcomas, and bladder cancer, currently in clinical trials.