eati.honorary members / eati.academicians
Patrizia Agostinis, Ph.D.
KU Leuven
Dr. P. Agostinis (PA) received her master in Biology at the University of Padova (Italy) and her PhD in biomedical science at the KU Leuven, Belgium, where she became first Research Associate of the Flemish Research Council (FWO) and then Professor at the KU Leuven. PA started her own research group in 1996 with a focus on mechanisms of cancer cell death induced by irradiation. Since 2000 PA is the group leader of the Cell Death Research & Therapy lab, at the Department of Cellular & Molecular Medicine of the KU Leuven, and in 2008 she became Full Professor at the same Institution. Recently, the lab of Dr. P. Agostinis documented that immunogenic cell death mediated by ER stress can be harnessed to develop novel and clinically relevant, next-generation dendritic cell-based immunotherapies for brain tumors. PA group is currently developing new anticancer vaccines based on the concept of immunogenic cell death and exploring the crosstalk between angiogenesis and antitumor immunity in melanoma.
Matthew Albert, M.D., Ph.D.
Institut Pasteur & INSERM
Matthew Albert is Director of Research INSERM and Head of the Laboratory of Dendritic Cell Immunobiology at the Institut Pasteur, Paris, leading a team in the area of dendritic cell immunobiology and tumor immunity. He graduated from Brown University, Providence, RI, USA in 1992 with a B.Sc in Chemistry, followed by a Ph.D in Immunology from The Rockefeller University, New York, USA, in 1999 and M.D. in Medicine from Cornell University Medical College, New York, USA, in 2000.
Kari Alitalo, M.D., Ph.D.
Haartman Institute, University of Helsinki
Dr. Kari Alitalo is a director of the Molecular Cancer Biology Research Program, Biomedicum Helsinki, University of Helsinki, Finland. The main interests of the Dr. Alitalo’s group is to understand the mechanisms of development of blood vessels from preexisting ones in a process called angiogenesis and to learn analogous mechanisms of lymphangiogenesis. They currently study angiogenesis and lymphatic vessels particularly in malignant tumors, focusing on the growth factor-receptor signaling and growth factor-mediated endothelial cell reprogramming. Most significantly, they have found that VEGF-C over-expression leads to lymphangiogenesis, intralymphatic tumor growth and lymph node metastasis in several tumor models.
James P. Allison, Ph.D.
Sloan-Kettering Institute
James P. Allison is currently the Chair of the Immunology Program at the Sloan-Kettering Institute. Dr. Allison is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the incumbent of the David H. Koch Chair in Immunologic Studies at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. Dr. Allison is a leader in the field of immunology, particularly in developing ways to help the immune system recognize and destroy cancer cells. His research is focused on the mechanisms that regulate the immunological response of T lymphocytes, especially strategies to manipulate those responses in clinically relevant areas, including autoimmunity, allergies, vaccinations, and tumor therapy.
Sebastian Amigorena, Ph.D.
Curie Institute
Dr. Sebastian Amigorena received his Ph.D. in Immunology and is Head of the Cancer and Immunology Unit of the Curie Institute, Paris, France. He is also Leader of the Dendritic Cells (DC) Antigen Presentation research group. His main scientific contributions in the last 10 years relate to antigen presentation in dendritic cells and immunotherapy. His laboratory is interested in the mechanisms involved in antigen presentation by DC, mainly related to cross presentation. Dr. Amigorena contributes to the understanding of endoplasmic reticulum recruitment and its participation in antigen uptake and cross presentation as well in the endosome migration and maturation.
Mads H Andersen, Ph.D.
Copenhagen University Hospital
Mads Hald Andersen is vice-director at the Center for Cancer Immune Therapy at Copenhagen University Hospital at Herlev as well as professor at the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Copenhagen University. In 2001 he gained his PhD from the Technical University of Denmark. The same year he co-founded the Tumor Immunology Group at the Danish Cancer Society. He obtained his DScTech in 2006, the same year as he co-founded the Center for Cancer Immune Therapy. Professor Andersen has considerable pharmaceutical experience, and has founded several biotech companies including Survac, Rhovac and IO Biotech Aps. He has been honored with several awards during his career including The Lundbeck Foundation research prize (2012), the Danish Cancer Society Research Award (2006) and the Hallas-Møller Stipend from the Novo Nordisk foundation (2007). His research has been focusing on the characterization of the natural immune responses towards malignant cells. He has identified a number of different T-cell antigens including survivin, the Bcl-2 family and RhoC. Recently, he described circulating T cells that specifically target normal, self-proteins, e.g., IDO,TDO, PD-L1 and Foxp3, expressed by regulatory immune cells.
Ron N. Apte, Ph.D.
Ben Gurion University of the Negev (BGU
Dr. Apte is professor of Immunology at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). He finished his Ph.D in 1978 at Bar Ilan University and joined Ben-Gurion University in 1981. He is the incumbent of the Irving Sklar Chair in Endocrinology and Cancer at BGU. Ron Apte is currently the Head of the Division of Life Sciences and Deputy Dean at the Faculty of Health Sciences. He is head of the Shraga Segal Department of Microbiology and Immunology. Dr. Apte is well known for his work in cytokine biology with special emphasis on interleukin-1 alpha (IL-1α). He has emphasized in his studies the unique functions of IL-1α and IL-1β in steady-state homeostasis and in disease (inflammation, cancer, myocardial infarction and atherosclerosis). The group of Dr. Apte has made seminal contributions on the role of IL-1 in cancer-mediated inflammation and on the differential roles of IL-1α and IL-1β in tumorigenesis, tumor invasiveness and angiogenesis and in interactions between the tumor and the host’s immune system.
Paolo A Ascierto, M.D.
Istituto Nazionale Tumori Fondazione "G. Pascale"
Dr Ascierto is Director of the Unit of Melanoma, Cancer Immunotherapy and Innovative Therapy at the National Tumor Institute Fondazione G. Pascale in Naples (Italy). He received his medical degree from the University of Naples. Before the present position at the Unit of Melanoma, Cancer Immunotherapy and Innovative Therapy of the National Tumour Institute, he previously served there as a postdoctoral fellow and then vice-director of the Department of Clinical Immunology. Major research interests have included genetics and proteomics research of melanoma, assessment of new molecular markers for tumour progression in patients with malignant melanoma, as well as targeted therapies for melanoma, biochemical and immunological monitoring, immunotherapy and vaccination treatments. He has served as principal investigator in numerous clinical trials and has been well-published in peer-reviewed journals on topics related to his interests.
Maha Ayyoub,Ph.D.
Gustave Roussy Cancer Campus
Maha Ayyoub received her Pharm.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toulouse (France) and worked at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (Switzerland) and Columbia University (USA). She is Research Director at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (Inserm, France) and member of the Cancer Vaccine Collaborative Trials Network (http://www.cancerresearch.org/grants-programs/clinical-accelerator/). Her research focuses on the investigation of anti-tumor adaptive immune responses and how these responses can be modulated to the benefit of cancer patients.
Fran Balkwill, Ph.D., FMedSci
Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London
Dr. Balkwill is Professor of Cancer Biology at Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, where she leads the Centre for Cancer and Inflammation. Her research is focused on the links between cancer and inflammation. She is especially interested in translating knowledge of cancer biology into new biological treatments for cancer and in the role that inflammatory cytokines play in cancer promotion. In 2006, she was made a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and elected a member of its Council later the same year. Dr. Balkwill is a non-parliamentary board member of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, POST, Chair of UAR (Understanding Animal Research) and a member of the Royal Society Faraday Award Committee. She was awarded an OBE in the 2008 Queen's Birthday Honours list. She is also actively involved in communication of science to non-specialist audiences, especially young people. She has written thirteen science books for children on cell and molecular biology, with titles such as Enjoy Your Cells and The Egg and Sperm Race. She is the Director of the Centre of the Cell, a £4 million biomedical science centre for children, educational website and outreach in Whitechapel.
David Baltimore, Ph.D.
California Institute of Technology
Dr. Baltimore is currently the Robert A. Millikan Professor of Biology at Caltech. He served as president of Caltech from 1997-2006. He received his Ph.D. at Rockefeller University in 1964. After postdoctoral fellowships at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a non-faculty research position at the Salk Institute, he joined the MIT faculty in 1968. Baltimore became president of Rockefeller University in New York City on July 1, 1990. After resigning on December 3, 1991, Baltimore remained on the Rockefeller University faculty and continued research until spring of 1994. He briefly rejoined the MIT faculty before moving to Caltech. In 1975 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Howard Temin and Renato Dulbecco "for their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell."
Jacques Banchereau, Ph.D.
Roche
Dr. Banchereau received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Paris in 1980 and later served as director of the Schering Plough Laboratory for Immunological Research near Lyon, France, where he was among the first to discover how to grow human dendritic cells. Dr. Banchereau moved to Baylor in 1996 to develop the Institute for Immunology and serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. He is currently Senior Vice President and Head of the Inflammation and Virology Discovery and Translational Areas (DTAs) with Roche in Nutley, NJ. In this role he oversees research and early development up to late stage development in the field of inflammation, including autoimmune and respiratory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) as well as Virology with hepatitis, HIV, influenza and other infectious diseases. He also serves as Roche Nutley's Chief Scientific Officer.
Philipp Beckhove, Ph.D
German Cancer Research Center
Yinon Ben-Neriah, M.D., Ph.D.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yinon Ben-Neriah is the Head of the Proteomics and Drug Design Program at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his M.D. from Tel Aviv University in 1979 and his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute in 1980. He has been published in journal such as Molecular Pharmacology, Biopolymers, and the European Journal of Cancer. Research projects revolve around his interest in signal transduction involving ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.
Pedro Berraondo Ph.D.
Center for Applied Medical Research (CIMA)
Dr. Berraondo completed his B.S. Degree in Pharmacy at the University of Navarra and earned his Pharm.D. in drug design, synthesis and evaluation from the University of Navarra. His main project was the production and evaluation of an adeno-associated virus encoding interferon alpha for the treatment of chronic hepatitis in the woodchuck model. Dr. Berraondo carried out postdoctoral research at the Institut Pasteur in Paris (France) under the supervision of Dr. Claude Leclerc, where he worked on tumor immunotherapy for the European project THERAVAC. He developed a fusion protein to target antigens to dendritic cells. He joined the Gene Therapy and Hepatology department at the Center for Applied Medical Research (CIMA) and since 2013 he belongs to the program of Immunology and Immunotherapy. Dr. Berraondo primary research interests include tumor gene immunotherapy and protein and peptide drug delivery.
Jay A. Berzofsky, M.D., Ph.D.
National Cancer Institute
Dr. Jay Berzofsky was appointed Chief of the new Vaccine Branch, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, in 2003, after being Chief of the Molecular Immunogenetics and Vaccine Research Section, Metabolism Branch, National Cancer Institute, NIH, since 1987. He graduated Summa cum Laude from Harvard (1967), and received a Ph.D. and M.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. After interning at Massachusetts General Hospital, he joined NIH in 1974. Dr. Berzofsky's research has focused on antigen processing and presentation by MHC molecules, the structure of antigenic determinants, cytokine and regulatory cell control of T cell function and avidity, and translation to the design of vaccines for AIDS, cancer, and viruses causing cancer. He has 492 scientific publications and a number of awards. He was elected as President of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (1993-94), a member of the Association of American Physicians, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was elected Distinguished Alumnus of the Year for 2007 by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He was also elected Chair of the Medical Sciences Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for 2007-2008. In 2008, he received the NIH Director’s Award and the NCI Merit Award, and in 2011 he received another NCI Director’s Merit Award.
Thomas Blankenstein, Ph.D.
Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine
Dr. Thomas Blankenstein is a group leader at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin and the Head of the Institute of Immunology of the Charité University of Medicine, Berlin, Germany. He received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Genetics in the Department of Immunology in Cologne, Germany. In 1988 he joined the Institute of Immunology at the Free University of Berlin, Germany and in 1991 he was a visiting scientist in the Department of Pathology at the University of Chicago, Illinois, USA. He moved to the Max Delbrück Center in 1994. His laboratory is interested in cancer immunology, immune and gene therapy, experimental cancer models, and tumor stroma.
Jean-Yves Blay, M.D., Ph.D.
Université Claude Bernard
Dr. Jean-Yves Blay is Professor of Medicine at the Université Claude Bernard from Lyon, France, and the Scientific Director of the Canceropole Lyon Rhône Alpes, a network of more than 1500 researchers and physicians working in the field of cancer in the French Rhône-Alpes region. His research interests focus on clinical and basic research in sarcomas, the biology of breast carcinoma and relation between tumor microenvironment and malignant cells with the goal of clinical applications in the fields of diagnosis, prognosis and treatment.
Vincent Brichard, M.D., Ph.D.
GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals
Dr. Vincent Brichard is the Vice President & Head of Immunotherapeutics at GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, Belgium. He has been published in journals such as "Vaccine", "International Journal of Cancer", and the "Journal of Clinical Oncology". He was also a keynote forum speaker at the BIT Life Sciences’ 7th Annual Congress of International Drug Discovery Science and Technology in 2009.
Vincenzo Bronte, M.D.
University of Verona
Dr. Vincenzo Bronte is currently the head of the immunology section in the department of medicine of Verona University and head of the U.O.C of immunology in the Policlinico G. B. Rossi Hospital. He is professor of immunology at the University of Verona. Dr. Bronte was awarded by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome, Italy) with the international prize "Francesco De Luca" for his scientific career in oncology, and by the italian foundation for cancer research (FIRC) with the Prize "Guido Venosta" for oncology researchers. Dr. Bronte’s major achievements has been the definition and characterization of immunoregulatory cells, now called myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs), whose negative influence on antitumor immunity represents an obstacle to a successful immunotherapy of cancer. Current projects in the laboratory are further exploring the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying tumor-induced immune dysfunctions, with the attempt to define novel drugs and approaches targeting tumor microenvironment, to be used alone or in combination with either active or passive immunotherapy strategies.
Xuetao Cao, Ph.D.
Zhejiang University School of Medicine
Dr. Xuetao Cao received his Ph.D. from Second Military Medical University, Shanghai, China in 1990. He became Professor in Immunology in 1992 at the Second Military Medical University and became Professor and Director of Institute of Immunology at Zhejiang University School of Medicine in 2000. He was elected as a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 2005. His major interests are immunobiology of APCs (dendritic cells, macrophages), TLR signaling and immune regulation, cancer immunotherapy and gene therapy. He identified a new regulatory dendritic cell (DC) subset and found that splenic stroma could drive mature DC to differentiate into regulatory DC.
Vincenzo Cerundolo, M.D., Ph.D., FMedSci
University of Oxford
Professor Vincenzo (Enzo) Cerundolo was the Director of the Human Immunology Unit at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine. Professor Cerundolo’s main research interest was the understanding of cell-cell interactions in the immune system that ultimately result in the expansion and activation of tumour-specific T cell populations. Understanding the mechanisms by which tumours impair effective tumour-specific immune responses, and identifying strategies by which to harness the cross-talk between the innate and adaptive arms of the immune system is pivotal to the development of more effective cancer vaccination strategies. Vincenzo Cerundolo deceased in January 2020.
Aled Clayton, Ph.D.
Cancer Research Wales; Cardiff University
Dr. Aled Clayton is a lecturer for the Cardiff University School of Medicine, UK. He completed his doctorate studies on kidney inflammation and scarring at the Institute of Nephrology, Cardiff. After completing his postdoctoral training he joined the Cancer Research Wales laboratories in 1999. Research interests include how cancer cell derived exosomes control immunological and other important processes in cancer. His research has been published in journals such as "The Journal of Immunology", "Cancer Research", and "Current Oncology".
Robert Coffman, Ph.D.
Dynavax Technologies Corporation
Robert L. Coffman is the Vice President and CSO for Dynavax Technologies Corp. Dr. Coffman joined Dynavax from the DNAX Research Institute where he had been since 1981, most recently as Distinguished Research Fellow. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University Medical School. Dr. Coffman has made fundamental discoveries about the regulation of immune responses in allergic and infectious diseases. He shared the William S. Coley Award for Research in Immunology for discovery of the Th1 and Th2 subsets of T lymphocytes, the two major types of T cells that control most immune responses. In 2006, Dr. Coffman was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. At Dynavax he has developed and initiated clinical development of novel therapeutics for asthma, autoimmune disease, hepatitis C infection and cancer and has played a key role in progression towards clinical approval of a new hepatitis B vaccine with greatly improved efficacy in immunocompromised and older adults.
Mario Colombo, Ph.D.
Italian National Cancer Institute
Mario Colombo, Ph.D., is director of molecular immunology at the Italian National Cancer Institute and senior editor for "Cancer Research".
José R Conejo-Garcia, M.D., Ph.D.
The Wistar Institute
Jose R. Conejo-Garcia is professor and leader of the Tumor Microenvironment and Metastasis Program at The Wistar Institute. He completed his training in Spain, Switzerland and Germany, before moving to the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S. and, subsequently, Dartmouth College. Dr. Conejo-Garcia’s research program focuses on identifying and targeting mechanisms controlling the balance between immunosuppression and protective immunity in the tumor microenvironment. In recent years, his studies have unveiled mechanisms driving the mobilization and immunosuppressive phenotype of regulatory dendritic cells that accumulate at tumor beds, with an emphasis on gynecologic malignancies. A complementary focal point in the lab is to understand the role of commensal microorganisms in the orchestration of tumor-promoting inflammation, and how to modulate this crostalk to develop more effective immunotherapies.
Max D. Cooper, M.D.
Emory University School of Medicine
Dr. Cooper is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Emory Vaccine Center, Emory University School of Medicine, GA, USA. Dr. Cooper graduated from Tulane University Medical School in 1957. While at the University of Minnesota from 1963-1967 he worked with Robert A. Good to establish the dual nature of the immune system. He is involved in clinical studies, particularly in relation to the cell differentiation abnormalities in immunodeficiency diseases and lymphoid malignancies. Current research focuses on the role of immunoglobulin and non-immunoglobulin genes in B cell development, and evolution of the adaptive immune system.
George Coukos, M.D., Ph.D
Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research
Lisa Coussens, Ph.D.
Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of California, San Francisco
Dr. Coussens is a Professor in the Pathology Department and Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco, USA. The Coussens lab focuses on the role of immune cells and leukocyte proteases as critical regulators of solid tumor development, including skin, lung and breast cancer development. Dr. Coussens received her Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from UCLA in 1993, and completed her postdoctoral fellowship in Cancer Biology at the University of California, San Francisco in Douglas Hanahans' laboratory. Since establishing her own laboratory in 1999, Dr. Coussens has received the prestigious Gertrude B. Elion Award from the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR), the Mallinckrodt Award for Medical Science and a V Foundation Scholar Award for her novel discoveries regarding the role of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) and mast cells in epithelial cancer development. More recently, Dr. Coussens was awarded an Era of Hope Scholar Award from the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program to support her novel investigations of chronic inflammation as a regulator of breast carcinogenesis.
Antonio Coutinho, M.D., Ph.D.
Gulbenkian Institute
António Coutinho studied at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, where he obtained a Ph.D. in Medical Microbiology. In his professional duties he is involved in work at the university and in research activities in Sweden, Switzerland and France. He organized and led the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he was also in charge of the Immunology Department. António Coutinho also created the Gulbenkian Doctorate Programme in Biomedicine, of which he is now head. In addition to this, he is currently Head of the Gulbenkian Institute for Science, Portugal.
Sandra Demaria, M.D., Ph.D.
Weill Cornell Medicine
Sandra Demaria obtained her M.D. from the University of Turin, Italy. She moved to New York City for her post-doctoral training in immunology, supported by an award from the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Research Fund, followed by training in anatomic pathology at New York University (NYU) School of Medicine. She was awarded a grant from NIH and remained at NYU until 2015. She is currently Professor of Radiation Oncology and Pathology at Weill Cornell Medicine Medical College. Dr. Demaria is internationally known for her studies demonstrating the synergy of local radiation therapy with different immunotherapeutic agents in pre-clinical models of cancer. Her laboratory was the first to show that radiotherapy can convert tumors unresponsive to immunotherapy with checkpoint inhibitors into responsive ones, a finding currently being translated in several clinical trials at multiple institutions. She is currently funded by NIH to study the role of cancer cell intrinsic type I interferon in the immunogenicity of radiation, and characterize the antigenic targets of radiation-induced tumor-specific T cells. As a breast cancer pathologist Dr. Demaria has also studied the immunological microenvironment of breast cancer in patients and she is a funding member of an international tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TILs)-working group focused on developing a consensus for the evaluation of TILs in breast cancer.
Carsten Denkert, M.D.
Charité University
Carsten Denkert is senior pathologist and head of the Translational Cancer Research Group at the Institute of Pathology, Charité University, Berlin and the METAcancer coordinator. His research interests include the development of new predictive and prognostic markers in malignant tumors.
Jolanda deVries, M.D., Ph.D.
Radboud Institute for Molecular Life Sciences
Jolanda M. de Vries was one of the pioneers to translate dendritic cell biology into potential clinical applications. The first clinical phase I/II studies in which patients were vaccinated with DCs loaded with tumor-specific peptides were initiated in 1997. She also developed a novel immuno-monitoring assay that is highly predictive for extended survival after vaccination with DCs. Her primary scientific interest continues along the line of DC-immunotherapy and in particular the migration and imaging of DC. For example, in-vivo imaging of ex-vivo labeled cells using MRI. New opportunities for other cell-types (e.g. subsets of DCs) and combination therapies are now being developed.
Madhav Dhodapkar, M.B.B.S.
Yale Cancer Center
Dr. Dhodapkar is the Arthur H. and Isabel Bunker Professor of Medicine (Hematology) and Professor of Immunobiology at Yale Cancer Center, CT, USA. Dhodapkar’s laboratory is studying how the immune system permits the transition to tumor cells, and is investigating strategies for boosting a patient’s immunity to tumors by using vaccines based on dendritic cells and immunomodulatory drugs. In 2002, Dhodapkar was named a New York Community Trust Scholar in Blood Diseases Research. That same year he received the Irma T. Hirschl Career Scientist Award and the Damon Runyon/Eli Lilly Translational Research Award. In 2000, he received a National Institutes of Health Mentored Physician Scientist Award and in 1999 he received the Cancer Research Institute Investigator Award. In 1995, Dhodapkar received the Florence A. Carter Fellowship in Leukemia Research, and he was a 1994 recipient of the William F.J. Summerskill Award from the Mayo Foundation.
Francesco Di Virgilio, M.D.
University of Ferrara
Francseco Di Virgilio was post-graduate fellow at the University of Padova. He was Royal Society and EMBO Short Term fellow and Honorary Research Assistant at the University College (London, UK) and then became Research Assistant at the University of Padova before being an EMBO Long Term Fellow and Visiting Scientist at the Columbia University (New York, USA). He was associated professor of Molecular Pathology and General Pathology at the University of Padova and full professor until 2009 at the University of Ferrara. Since 2009 he is Professor of Clinical Pathology at the University of Ferrara. He was dean for Education (Presidente Corso di Laurea in Medicina) and departmental chairman at the University of Ferrara. He also was the deputy Rector for Research and Technology Transfer from at the University of Ferrara and is a member of the International Scientific Committee of the National Research Council Institute of Cell Biology and Neurobiology, Monterotondo, Rome (Italy) since 2005. He was national Member of the Managing Committee of the COST BM 1406 EU Project and chairman of the PhD Course in Molecular Medicine and Pharmacology at the University of Ferrara. During recent years his main focus of interest has been signalling by extracellular nucleotides (purinergic signalling) in inflammatory cells (with particular emphasis on the mechanism of Interleukin-1b release), the role of purinergic receptors (namely P2X7) in host-tumor interaction, and the biochemical characterization of the tumor microenvironment.
Glenn Dranoff, M.D.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Glenn Dranoff received his M.D. from Duke University in 1985. He completed an internship and residency in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital and a clinical fellowship in medical oncology at DFCI. His postdoctoral training was with Dr. Richard Mulligan at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. His research focuses on understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the stimulation of tumor immunity and on the development of cancer vaccines. Dr. Dranoff is currently an Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and DFCI.
Alexander M.M. Eggermont, M.D., Ph.D.
Institut Gustave Roussy
Professor Alexander M.M. Eggermont is Director of the Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France where he is heading one of Europe's leading cancer research centers with over 400 research scientists. He is the former Head of Surgery at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands and was President of ECCO (2007 - 2009). He is the current President of the European Academy of Cancer Science. His clinical specialties include melanoma, sarcoma and regional therapy techniques (TNF-based Isolated limb perfusion programme), general drug development and clinical trial methodology. He heads with Timo ten Hagen the Laboratory for Experimental Surgical Oncology, which specializes in tumor pathophysiology and drug targeting, tumor vasculature and tumour biology.
Dean W. Felsher, M.D., Ph.D.
Stanford School of Medicine
Dr. Dean Felsher is the Associate Professor of Medicine and of Pathology at Stanford University, California, USA. He obtained his B.A. in Chemistry at the University of Chicago and his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Research interests include both basic science and translational research studies that investigate how oncogenes initiate and sustain tumorigenesis. He is a 1996 LRF Fellow and 2001 Junior Faculty Award Recipient.
Carl Figdor, Ph.D.
Nijmegen Centre for Molecular Life Sciences
Professor Figdor is Scientific Director of the Nijmegen Centre for Molecular Life Sciences, Professor of Experimental Immunology and Professor of Cell Biophysics at University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. in 1982 from The Netherlands Cancer Institute and continued to work there till 1994. He was appointed to professorships in 1992 at the University of Twente, The Netherlands, and in 1994 at Radbound University, Nijmegen. Dr. Figdor is one of the world leaders in the area of immunotherapy for cancer. Major current projects include an investigation of the role of lectin-like receptors in antigen uptake and the role of the cytoskeleton in dendritic cell adhesion and migration. In 2006 he received the NWO-Spinoza Prize for his groundbreaking research into the use of immune cells against cancer and for how he translates fundamental research into patient care.
Olivera (Olja) Finn, Ph.D.
University of Pittsburgh
Olivera J. Finn, Ph.D., is chair and professor of the department of immunology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and director of the immunology program at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI), PA, USA. Dr. Finn’s research interests and expertise are in the areas of tumor immunology, transplant immunology and T-cell biology. In particular, her group has identified a novel immune response to a tumor-associated antigen, MUC1, expressed on breast, pancreatic, colon, ovarian and other carcinomas of epithelial cell origin. This work has led to the development of a potential cancer vaccine based on the protein cyclin B1 that is currently being tested in clinical trials.
Alain Fischer, M.D., Ph.D.
Necker Hospital
Alain Fischer is a professor of pediatric immunology at the Université Paris Descartes and the Institut Universitaire de France. Also, since 1996, he has served as the director of the pediatric immunology department at the Necker Hospital, Paris, France. Dr Fischer's main research interests are in gene therapy, genetics of immunological disorders, primary immunodeficiency diseases, and the development of the lymphoid system. Over the last 15 years, he and his colleagues have analyzed the mechanisms of hereditary diseases of the immune system. In 2008, Dr. Fischer received the INSERM “Grand Prix” for his career achievements. Since 2002, Dr. Fischer has been a member of the French Academy of Science and the European Molecular Biology Organization. He has been a member of the French National Ethical Committee and director of the French Program for Rare Disease Research.
Richard Flavell, Ph.D., FRS
Yale School of Medicine
Dr. Flavell’s research focuses on the molecular and cellular basis of the immune response using gene-edited mice to study innate and adaptive immunity, T cell tolerance and activation in immunity and autoimmunity, apoptosis, and regulation of T cell differentiation. Dr. Flavell is a co-discoverer of introns in cellular genes: he showed DNA methylation correlates inversely with, and prevents, gene expression. As a postdoc he was the first to develop reverse genetics; he is a pioneer in the use of this approach in vivo to study function. His laboratory has shown that the NLRP6 inflammasome maintains homeostasis with the gut microbiota through controlling the mucus layer. In the absence of this control, dysbiosis and hence susceptibility to IBD, metabolic syndrome and colon cancer results. He showed that dysbiotic microbes drive intestinal inflammation and elicit specific IgA responses that identified the organisms that appear to play a causal role in human Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis. Dr. Flavell is a Fellow of the Royal Society, member of EMBO, member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.
Guido Forni, M.D.
University of Turin
Guido Forni is a faculty member for the Department of Clinical BIological Sciences at the University of Turin, Italy. Following his medical studies he performed postdoctoral work in the Department of Microbiology, University of Turin, Italy and became an Assistant Professor. From 1974 to 1977 he was a Visiting Scientist in the Laboratory of Immunology, NIH, Bethesda, MD under the supervision of Ira Green. In 1980 he used a Yamagiwa-Yoshida International Study grant, IUCC, to work at the Tumor Immunology Unit, University College, London. He became a full Professor of Immunology at the University of Turin in 1986, and since then his laboratory has contributed significantly to understanding the mechanisms by which the cytokines in the tumor environment switch the immune recognition of tumor cells. Research interests include: studying the mechanisms that immune responses direct against antigens to inhibit the tumor onset, identifying new oncoantigens expressed during the neoplastic progression by gene expression arrays and redulated by miRNA, and new antitumor DNA vaccines based on antigen and siRNA coding.
Wolf Hervé Fridman, M.D., Ph.D.
Centre de Recherche des Cordeliers, INSERM
Wolf Hervé Fridman is the Director of Cordeliers Research Center (INSERM), University Paris Descartes and Head of the Immunology unite at European Georges Pompidou Hospital, Paris, France. Cordeliers Research Center was formerly known as the Federative Research Institute (IFR58), and Fridman became the Director of IFR58 in 2005. In 2007 the Cordeliers Research Center was created with Fridman as the Director.
Dmitry Gabrilovich, M.D., Ph.D.
Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute
Dr. Dmitry Gabrilovich is a Senior Member at the Moffitt Cancer Center, FL, USA in the Immunology Department. He and his co-workers are investigating abnormalities in the function of professional antigen-presenting cells, or dendritic cells (DC). He is one of the pioneers in discovering that murine and human MDSC have a significant role in the suppression of anti-tumor immune responses. His current research is focused on understanding the mechanisms of tumor-associated immunosuppression and on the development of new and effective cancer vaccines.
Thomas Gajewski, M.D., Ph.D.
The University of Chicago
Dr. Thomas Gajewski is a faculty member for the Department of Pathology and Medicine as well as the Cancer Research Center at the University of Chicago, Illinois, USA. He received his B.A., M.D. and Ph.D. from The University of Chicago. Dr. Gajewski’s lab studies the molecular and cellular regulation of T lymphocyte activation and differentiation, and applies this information to preclinical and clinical efforts to promote anti-tumor immunity in vivo. He recently received an NIH Award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease to study the role of DGKs and EGR2 in controlling T cell activation and peripheral tolerance.
Jérôme Galon, Ph.D.
Centre de Recherche des Cordeliers, INSERM
Specialized in the fields of immunology and cancer, Dr. Jérôme Galon is Research Director at INSERM (French NIH), and head of the laboratory of Integrative Cancer Immunology, in Paris, France. His work on the comprehensive analysis of the tumor-microenvironment and the role of T-cells in human cancer led to the demonstration of the importance of adaptive pre-existing immunity in human cancer, and the concept of cancer immune-contexture. He pioneered the Immunoscore. He is the co-founder of HalioDx company and the Chairman of its scientific council. His contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including the William B. Coley Award, USA.
Udo S. Gaipl Ph.D.
Universitätsklinikum Erlangen
Since 2007 Dr. Udo Gaipl heads the Radiation Immunobiology at the Department of Radiation Oncology of the Universitätsklinikum Erlangen and is coordinator of the network Immunobiology of the German Society for Radiation Oncology (DEGRO). He obtained his Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2003 for studies on the role of complement and DNase I in the opsonisation and clearance of dying cells - implications for the etiopathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosus. Following the PostDoc research in the EU-project APOCLEAR in close co-operation with the Clinical Immunology Unit at the Hospitale San Raffaele in Milano, he continued his work in Erlangen in 2005 on dying and dead cells as inducer of chronic autoimmunity and as tool for immune intervention, with special focus on tumor immunology. He obtained the venia legendi for Experimental Medicine in 2009 and since 2015 he is Professor for Experimental Medicine with specialization on translational radiation oncology. We examine targeted (DNA-damage and DNA-repair) and „non-targeted“ (abscopal immune-mediated) effects of radiation and perform detailed immunomonitoring of tumor patients during radiochemotherapy and patients exposed to low doses of radiation. Focus is set in pre-clinical tumor and inflammation models and in immunophenotyping of patients on modulation of innate and adaptive immunity by combination of radiation with immunotherapy (autologous whole tumor cell vaccines generated with high-hydrostatic pressure technology, hyperthermia and immune checkpoint blockade) as well as on anti-inflammatory modes of action of low doses of radiation with different qualities, including radiation protection issues.
Lorenzo Galluzzi, Ph.D.
Weill Cornel Medical College
Lorenzo Galluzzi is currently Assistant Professor of Cell Biology in Radiation Oncology with the Department of Radiation Oncology of the Weill Cornell Medical College (New York, NY, USA). Prior to joining Weill Cornell Medical College (2017), Lorenzo Galluzzi was a Junior Scientist of the Research Team Apoptosis, Cancer and Immunity at the Cordeliers Research Center (Paris, France; 2012-2016). Lorenzo Galluzzi did his post-doctoral training at the Gustave Roussy Comprehensive Cancer Center (Villejuif, France; 2009-2011), after receiving his PhD from the University Paris Sud (Le Kremlin-Bicetre, France; 2005-2008). He is also Associate Director of the European Academy for Tumor Immunology (EATI), and Founding Member of the European Research Institute for Integrated Cellular Pathology (ERI-ICP). Lorenzo Galluzzi is best known for major experimental and conceptual contributions to the fields of cell death, autophagy, tumor metabolism and tumor immunology. In particular, he provided profound insights into the links between adaptive stress responses in cancer cells and the activation of a clinically relevant tumor-targeting immune response in the context of chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Lorenzo Galluzzi has published more than 450 scientific articles in international peer-reviewed journals. According to a survey published by Lab Times, he was the 6th and the youngest of the 30 most-cited European cell biologists (for the period 2007-2013), and he has been nominated Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics (formerly, Thomson Reuter) in 2016 (Biology & Biochemistry), 2018 (Cross-Fields) and 2019 (Immunology and Molecular Biology & Genetics). Lorenzo Galluzzi currently operates as Editor-in-Chief of three journals: OncoImmunology (which he co-founded in 2011), International Review of Cell and Molecular Biology, and Molecular and Cellular Oncology (which he co-founded in 2013). In addition, Lorenzo Galluzzi currently serves as Founding Editor for Microbial Cell and Cell Stress, Associate Editor for Cell Death and Disease and Aging, Section Editor for Cells, and Guest Editor for Methods in Enzymology and Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science.
Luca Gattinoni, M.D.
National cancer Institute
Dr. Gattinoni received his M.D. from the Universita' degli Studi of Milan, Italy. Following the completion of his residency in medical oncology at the Istituto Nazionale Tumori in Milan, he joined the NCI in 2003 as a Visiting Fellow and became a Staff Scientist in 2008. In 2013, Dr. Gattinoni was appointed as an Earl Stadtman Tenure-Track Investigator at the Experimental Transplantation and Immunology Branch. His honors include the 2004 SITC Presidential Award, the 2012 Wilson S. Stone Memorial Award and the 2013 NCI Director’s Intramural Innovation Award. Dr. Gattinoni’s laboratory is focused on understanding the transcriptional, metabolic, and microRNA-mediated regulation of T cell self-renewal and multipotency with the goal of developing new T cell-based immunotherapies for the treatment of patients with advanced cancer and hematologic malignancies.
Frederic Geissmann, M.D., Ph.D.
King's College London
Professor Geissman is the Head of the Centre for Molecular & Cellular Biology of Inflammation and Professor and ARUK Chair of Inflammation Biology at King’s College London, UK. He received is M.D. and Ph.D. from the University Paris Descartes. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow in molecular immunology in the Laboratory of Dan Littman in the Skirball Institute, NY, USA from 2000-2003. His research focuses on the biology of inflammation and inflammatory diseases.
Ronald Germain, M.D., Ph.D.
National Institute of Health
Dr. Germain is Chief, Laboratory of Systems Biology and Chief, Lymphocyte Biology Section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. in 1976 from Harvard University, USA. Since that time, he has investigated basic T-cell immunobiology, first on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and, since 1982, as the Chief, Lymphocyte Biology Section in the Laboratory of Immunology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health. More recently, his laboratory has been focused on the details of T cell-antigen presenting cell interactions and the relationship between immune tissue organization and control of adaptive immunity at both the initiation and effector stages.
Francois Ghiringhelli, M.D., Ph.D.
Cancer Center Georges Francois Leclerc
Francois Ghiringhelli is an associate professor of Medical Oncology at the Cancer Center Georges Francois Leclerc and research director at INSERM. His medical training leading to a grade of MD in 2006 was completed by a specialization in clinical oncology. During his medical training he obtained a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology and Immunology at the INSERM Research Unit 517 “Cell death and cancer” directed by Pr. Eric Solary in Dijon. He discovered the capacity of low dose cyclophosphamide to selectively eliminate regulatory T cells. He subsequently joined Laurence Zitvogel‟s laboratory at Gustave Roussy cancer center in Villejuif, France. During that time he substantially contributed to the elucidation of certain steps of the mechanism of immunogenic cell death under the direction of Guido Kroemer and Laurence Zitvogel. Since 2009 he directs an INSERM research team in Dijon focusing on the effects of cancer chemotherapy on the anti-tumor immune response both in an experimental in vivo tumor model and in cancer bearing patients. He discovered the capacity of 5-Fluorouracil to eliminate myeloid derived suppressors. He also is interested in CD4 T cells responses in the tumor bed and he embraces the possibility to improve this anticancer immune response by genetic or pharmacology intervention.
Nicolas Glaichenhaus, Ph.D.
Institut de Pharmacologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire
Dr. Nicolas Glaichenhaus is the Team Leader for Immune Response and Tolerance at Institut de Pharmacologie Moleculaire et Cellulaire, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, France. Recent studies focus on the molecular and cellular mechanisms that are responsible for the development of allergic airway inflammation.
Laurie Glimcher, M.D.
Harvard Medical School
Laurie Glimcher is Professor of Immunology at the Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University, USA. She is also a Professor of Medicine with Harvard Medical School, Senior Rheumatologist with Brigham and Women's Hospital, Associate Member of the Broad Institute, and Team Leader of the Ragon Institute of MCH, MIT and Harvard. She received her B.A. from Radcliffe College and her M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Her postdoctoral training occurred at Harvard and in the Laboratory of Immunology at the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda. Dr. Glimcher has received many honors and awards, including: the Soma Weiss Award for Undergraduate Research, the Distinguished Young Investigator Award from the American College of Rheumatology, the Leukemia Society's Stohlman Memorial Scholar Award, the FASEB Excellence in Science Award, and the American Society of Clinical Investigation Investigator Award. The Glimcher laboratory has recently focused on the function of T-bet in dendritic cells in mucosal immunity and tumorigenesis with an emphasis on inflammatory bowel disease.
James L. Gulley, M.D., Ph.D., F.A.C.P.
National Institutes of Health
Douglas Hanahan, Ph.D.
Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC)
Dr. Douglas Hanahan is the Head of the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research. He received a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard, where he was a Harvard Junior Fellow. He worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, USA as a graduate student and as a faculty member. While at Cold Spring Harbor he developed innovative models for studying human cancer. He continued this work when he joined the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics and Hormone Research at the University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA in 1988. He became the Head of ISREC in 2009. Hanahan’s accomplishments have been recognized by his election to several honor societies, such as the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2007), the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academies (2008), the US National Academy of Science (2009), and the European Molecular Biology Organization (2010).
Adrian Hayday, Ph.D.
King's College, London
Dr. Adrian Hayday is the Kay Glendinning Professor of Immunobiology at King's College, London. He obtained his Ph.D. in tumor virology from the Imperial College London and undertook post-doctoral training at MIT. In 1998, after 13 years on the faculty of the Departments of Biology and Immunobiology at Yale University, he returned to Guy’s Hospital London, to the Kay Glendinning Professor & Chair in the Department of Immunobiology at King's College. Research interests include the genetic approaches to immune system function and development as well as unconventional T cells and the regulation of tissue inflammation. He has published over 150 papers, and among other things, contributed to the cloning of the T-cell receptor (TCR), in particular the unanticipated TCR-gamma chain genes. In 1997, he received the William Clyde DeVane Medal, Yale College's highest honour for teaching and scholarship, and he was elected a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2002.
F. Stephen Hodi, M.D.
Dana Farber Cancer Institute / Harvard Medical School
Jules A Hoffmann, Ph.D.
University of Strasbourg Institute of Advanced Study
Jules Hoffmann is Professor at the University of Strasbourg and Senior Researcher at CNRS he dedicated his work to the study of the genetic and molecular mechanisms responsible for innate immunity in insects. The work of Hoffmann and associates work has provided new insights into the defense mechanisms that organisms, from the most primitive up to humans, employ against infectious agents. By demonstrating the marked conservation of innate defense mechanisms between insects and humans, the work initiated by Hoffmann and his collaborators has led to a re-evaluation of the role of innate immunity in mammals. More generally, the Drosophila model has enabled biologists throughout the world to make considerable progress, not only in developmental genetics and innate immunity but also in the study of certain human pathologies and in the understanding of memory, behavior, sleep and nutrition phenomena. With Bruce A. Beutler and Ralph M. Steinman, Hoffmann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2011. Hoffmann set up and headed the CNRS laboratory “Endocrinology and Immunology of Insects” within the CNRS Institut de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire in Strasbourg, which he also directed from 1994 to 2006 and where he still works with his collaborators. He was President of the French Académie des Sciences in 2007 and 2008, and is a member of the Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Germany and Russia. He has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes, such as, in recent years, the Rosenstiel Award (with Ruslan Medzhitov) for his work on immunity (2010), the Keio Medical Science Prize (with Shizuo Akira) (2011), the 2011 Gairdner Award for medical research (with Shizuo Akira) and the 2011 Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine (with Bruce Beutler and Ruslan Medzhitov). He also received the CNRS Gold Medal. Hoffmann is Officier de la Légion d'Honneur in France and is an Immortel at the Académie Française (2012).
Axel Hoos, M.D., Ph.D.
Glaxo Smith Kline, Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium
Dr. Axel Hoos is Vice President, Oncology R&D at Glaxo Smith Kline Pharmaceuticals (GSK), where he directs clinical trials and translational research on molecular mechanisms of cancer and tumor-host interactions for rational combination of therapies to optimize patient outcomes. Prior to his current role, Dr. Hoos was the Medical Lead in Immunology/Oncology at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) where he developed the Yervoy (Ipilimumab; anti CTLA-4) monoclonal antibody in melanoma and other indications. Before BMS, Dr. Hoos was Senior Director of Clinical Development at Antigenics Inc., a biotechnology company, which develops therapies for cancer and infectious diseases. Dr. Hoos studied medicine at Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany and received his Ph.D. in Molecular Oncology for work in molecular biology and tumor immunology at the German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg. He trained in surgery with a focus on surgical oncology at the Technical University in Munich and further in surgery, molecular pathology and tumor immunology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Anne Hosmalin, M.D., Ph.D.
Cochin Institute
Anne Hosmalin is a dendritic cell expert and a Research Director and Professor at the Cochin Institute. She graduated as a M.D. from Paris-Descartes University in 1986 and as a Ph.D. in Immunology from Paris-Pierre & MarieCurie University in 1990. Her post-doctoral fellowship was at the NCI, NIH, Bethesda, MD, USA with Dr. J.A. Berzofsky. Since 1998, she has been the head of the“Antigen Presentation by Dendritic Cell” Team at the Cochin Institute in Paris.
Chistoph Huber, M.D.
Association for Cancer Immunotherapy
Prof. Christoph Huber is one of the leading scientists in the fields of tumor immunology, gene therapy for malignant diseases, and stem cell biology and transplantation. Prof. Huber studied medicine at Leopold-Franzens University in Innsbruck, Austria, where he also finished his training in internal medicine. After doing research at various institutions in Sweden and the US, he founded one of the first European stem cell transplantation facilities at the Innsbruck Medical University Center in 1983. He was appointed professor and head of the university’s clinical immune biology and stem cell transplantation unit in 1986. From 1990 through 2009, he chaired the department Hematology and Oncology at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. In translating innovative cancer immunotherapies into the clinic, he and a number of partners since 2001 established two biotechnology firms, Ganymed Pharmaceuticals and BioNTech. Since 2002, Prof. Huber has been founding member and chairman of the international Association for Cancer Immunotherapy (CIMT). In 2010, he and his partners initiated the foundation of TRON–Translational Oncology at the University Medical Center of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Furthermore, he founded the Cutting Edge Technology Cluster for Individualized Immune Intervention (Ci3) in the Rhine-Main metropolitan area.
Darrell J Irvine , Ph.D.
Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT
Biography: Darrell Irvine, Ph.D., is a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He also serves on the steering committee of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. His research is focused on the application of engineering tools to problems in cellular immunology and the development of new materials for vaccine and drug delivery. Current efforts are focused on problems related to vaccine development for HIV and and immunotherapy of cancer. Dr. Irvine’s work has been recognized by numerous awards, including a Beckman Young Investigator award, an NSF CAREER award, selection for Technology Review’s ‘TR35’, election as a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society, election as a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and appointment as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is the author of over 100 publications, reviews, and book chapters and an inventor on numerous patents.
Tyler Jacks, Ph.D.
Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, MIT
Dr. Tyler Jacks is the Director of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, USA and an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Center. He received his Ph.D. from University of California, San Francisco in 1988 and completed his post-doctoral research at MIT in the Whitehead Institute. In 1992 he was named an assistant professor at MIT and associate professor with tenure in 1997. In 2000, he was promoted to full professor standing. Dr. Jacks was named the 2005 Simon M. Shubitz Lecturer and Award recipient, and shared the 2005 Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research awarded by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The Jacks Lab is interested in the genetic events that contribute to the development of cancer. The research focus has been a series of mouse strains engineered to carry mutations in genes known to be involved in human cancer. Current research remains centered on the use of gene targeting to create more powerful and accurate mouse models of human cancer and to explore the pathways regulated by cancer-associated genes.
Dirk Jaeger, M.D, Ph.D.
University Medical Center Heidelberg
Prof. Dr. Dirk Jäger is the director of the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT), Heidelberg and the Department of Medical Oncology at the University Center Heidelberg. He also is head of the research group “Applied Tumor Immunity” at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). He began his scientific career at the Cornell Medical Center and the Ludwig Institute, New York. Subsequently, he joined the Department of Hematology/Oncology, Krankenhaus Nordwest, Frankfurt as head of the Research Group `Tumor antigen identification and characterization´. He moved on to the University Hospital Zurich, where he became PI of the Laboratory for Tumor Immunology at the Oncology Department. Since 2005 he works at the NCT in Heidelberg. His research focuses on the characterization and understanding of tumor host immune interactions at the tumor site and the development of novel treatment strategies to therapeutically interact in this immunological interplay. The establishment of immunmonitoring platforms using whole slide tissue analysis (IHC) combined with cytokine/chemokine analysis in microdissected tissue areas to profile the immunological microenvironment in tumors, provides the basis for several, currently, ongoing translational clinical trials evaluating novel immunomodulators, antigen specific immune cells as well as gene modified immune cells.
Elizabeth (Liz) Jaffee, M.D.
Johns Hopkins Medicine
Dr. Elizabeth Jaffee is the Dana and Albert Cubby Broccoli Endowed Chair in Oncology and the Medical Director of the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center Cell Processing and Gene Therapy Facility, MD, USA. Since 1995 and 1999, respectively, she has been part of the faculty in the School of Medicine's graduate programs in immunology and in cellular and molecular medicine. She also became part of the graduate program in pharmacology in 2000. After receiving her M.D. degree from the New York Medical College, USA, Dr. Jaffee began her career with internship, residency, and a research fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. She came to Hopkins in 1989 and completed Senior Clinical and Research Fellowships in Oncology. In 1992, Dr. Jaffee joined the Hopkins faculty as Assistant Professor of Oncology at the School of Medicine, becoming Associate Professor in 1997. In 1999 she received a joint appointment as Associate Professor of Pathology, and in 2002 became professor of both Oncology and Pathology. She is recognized internationally as a leader in the development of immune based therapies for the treatment of pancreatic and breast cancer.
Carl H. June, M.D.
Abramson Cancer Center, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Carl H. June is the Program Director of Translational Research Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute and a Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He graduated from Baylor College of Medicine, Houston in 1979 and had graduate training in Immunology and malaria with Dr. Paul-Henri Lambert at the World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. He received post-doctoral training in transplantation biology with Dr. E. Donnell Thomas at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle from 1983 - 1986. He founded the Immune Cell Biology Program and was head of the Department of Immunology at the Naval Medical Research Institute from 1990 to 1995. He rose to Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Cell and Molecular Biology at the Uniformed Services University for the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland before assuming his current position as of February 1, 1999. Current laboratory research include studies of various mechanisms of lymphocyte activation that relate to immune tolerance and adoptive immunotherapy.
Michael Karin, Ph.D.
University of California, San Diego
Dr. Karin was born in Tel Aviv, Israel and received the Bachelor of Science degree in 1975 from Tel Aviv University, with a major in Biology. In 1975 he arrived in the US and in 1979 received a Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biology from the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Dr. Karin followed his graduate studies with postdoctoral fellowships at the Fox Chase Institute for Cancer Research, working in the laboratory of Dr. Beatrice Mintz, and the laboratory of Dr. John Baxter at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Karin joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego in 1986, where currently he is a Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology. Dr. Karin's research interests focus on gene expression, signal transduction, transcription factors, oncogenes, and protein kinases. He has received numerous awards honors including the Oppenheimer Award for Excellence in Research from the Endocrine Society, C.E.R.I.E.S. Research Award for Physiology or Biology of the Skin, and election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005.
Klas Karre, Ph.D.
Karolinska Institute
Dr. Klas Kärre received his Ph.D. from the Karolinska Institute in 1981 and has been a professor in Molecular Immunology at the Institute since 1993. In the mid-1980s Kärre discovered one of the mechanisms for how cells of the immune system, natural killer cells (NK cells), identify their target cells and kill them. His current group focus on NK cells and T-cells, in particular how these cells can recognize and be regulated by MHC class I molecules. They seek to address problems spanning from molecular and structural analysis of receptor-ligand interactions to the biology of virus infections, transplantation, tumor resistance and autoimmune disease. Dr. Kärre became a member of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine in 2006 and its chairman in 2009.
Stefan Kaufmann, Ph.D.
Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology
Dr. Stefan Kaufmann was a founding director and is currently the Director of the Immunology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Berlin, Germany. He studied Biology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and graduated with his Ph.D. in 1977. From 1987-1991 he was Professor of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Ulm, and rose to be Full Professor and Chair of the Department from 1991-1998. Kaufmann has published more than 600 scientific original papers and review articles and, according to the Institute for Scientific Information, he is one of the highly cited immunologists worldwide for the decade 1990 to 2000. He has also received numerous rewards and honors for his scientific achievements in immunology of infectious diseases including: in 1987 the Alfried Krupp Award for young professors, in 1991 the Smith Kline Beecham Science Prize, and in 2007 he was conferred the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by the Université de la Mediterranée, Aix-Marseille II, France.
Oliver Kepp, Ph.D.
INSERM
Oliver Kepp received his Ph.D. in 2006 from the Humboldt University and the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Germany. He is currently a senior scientist in the laboratory of Guido Kroemer, where he investigates several aspects of immunogenic cell death, focusing on systems biology approaches. He has published more than 160 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and he is currently the 24th of the 30 most-cited European cell biologists (relative to the period 2007–2013).
N Samir N Khleif, M.D.
Georgia Cancer Center at Augusta University.
Prof. Dr. Khleif currently serves as the Director of the Georgia Cancer Center at Augusta University. He is a Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Cancer Scientist and Clinician and holds a professorship in Medicine, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Graduate Studies at Augusta University. Dr. Khleif’s research program focuses on the molecular mechanisms of the interaction between cancer and the immune system. He received his medical degree at the University of Jordan, Amman Jordan. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine at the Medical College of Ohio and his fellowship in Medical Oncology at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland. His laboratory works on understanding the mechanisms of cancer-induced immune suppression, and utilizing this knowledge for the development of novel immune therapeutics and vaccines against cancer. His team designed and conducted some of the first cancer vaccine clinical trials directed against specific genetic changes in cancer cells. Currently, his research group works on strategies to target immune suppressive mechanisms of T regulatory cells and co-inhibitory molecules such as PD1 and CTLA4; developing novel strategies to manipulate such pathways to selectively block cancer immune suppression; and developing novel approaches in clinical trials for immune therapy in immune combination approaches to enhance anti-tumor effects.
Rolf Kiessling, Ph.D.
Karolinska Institute
Dr. Rolf Kiessling holds the full professorship in experimental oncology at Karolinska Institute, Stockholm. This position is combined with a chief physician position at the oncology clinic at the Karolinska Hospital. He studied Medicine at Karolinska institute and performed his PhD studies in Immunology at the Department of Tumor Biology, Karolinska institute, from 1970-1976 and his postodoctoral studies at Scripps research institute, La Jolla, from 1979-1980. His lab is currently working to define new tumor antigens and vaccination methods that could be used in immune and gene therapy. These are tested experimentally and in clinical trials in cancer patients. He is also interested in better understanding how tumors can escape detection of the host immune system.
Eva Klein, D.Sc.
Karolinska Institute
Eva Klein is a Professor of Tumor Biology for the Department of Microbiology, Tumor, and Cell Biology at the Karolinska Institute. She received her Ph.D. from the Karolinska Institute in 1955. In 1975, Professor Klein, along with two colleagues, published a landmark paper describing their study of “natural killer (NK) cells,” which are now known to have an important role in protecting humans against a variety of pathogens, especially viruses. She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Hungarian Immunological Society, the Israel Immunological Society, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Also, she was honored with a D.Sc. from the University of Nebraska, Omaha, USA in 1993 and a D.Sc. from Ohio State University, Columbus, USA in 2003 for her contributions to society. Research interests include the variation in the expression of EBV encoded protein in B lymphocytes.
Philippe Kourilsky, Ph.D.
The Veolia Environment Institute
Dr Philippe Kourilsky is Professor and Chair of Molecular Immunology at the College de France as well as a member of the French Academy of Sciences. He also currently sits on the Board of the Veolia Environment Company in which he chairs the Innovation Committee. He spent most of his career as a member of CNRS (Central National de la Recherche Scientifique) before being elected in 1998 to the College de France where he holds the chair of Molecular Immunology. From 1993 to 1996, he was the Director of Research of Pasteur Merieux Connaught (now Sanofi Pasteur), a leading vaccine company. From 2000-2005 he was the Director General of the Pasteur Institute in Paris (France), where he is also Associate Professor of Molecular Immunology. He has been an adviser for biotechnologies in the French Ministry of Research and has participated in the administration of various research Institutions. He graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris in 1964 and obtained his PhD in 1970 from the University of Paris.
Peter Krammer, M.D.
German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)
Peter H. Krammer has been the Head of the Tumorimmunology Program at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany since 1993. He has held may positions at DKFZ, including visiting scientist, acting Head of the Department of Immunogenetics, and acting Director of the Institute of Immunology and Genetics. He is also one of the founders of Apogenix GmbH, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company that develops protein therapeutics for the treatment of cancer and inflammatory diseases. Dr. Krammer’s research interests include basic and translational investigation of apoptosis as well as the role of apoptosis in the immune system, in cancer and in the pathogenesis of various diseases. He has pioneered research in the field of apoptosis, and his work has been key to understanding the pathways that control this mechanism of cell death.
Guido Kroemer, M.D., Ph.D.
University of Paris Descartes
Prior to joining INSERM (1993), Dr. Kroemer was Senior Scientist of the European Community at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), at the National Center of Molecular Biology (1990-1992) and at the National Center of Biotechnology (1993). Dr. Kroemer did his post-doctoral training in the Collège de France, Nogent-sur-Marne (1988-1989) and at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, after receiving his Ph.D/M.D. degree at the same University in 1985. He also holds a Ph.D. degree in Biology (Autonomous University of Madrid, 1992). Dr. Kroemer has made important contributions to medical research through his groundbreaking work in the fields of cell biology and cancer research. He is best known for the discovery that the permeabilization of mitochondrial membranes constitutes a decisive step in programmed cell death. Kroemer has explored the fine mechanisms of mitochondrial cell death control, the molecular pathways that explain the inhibition of cell death in cancer cells, upstream of or at the level of mitochondria, and the mechanisms that make cancer cell death immunogenic. His work has had far reaching implications for the comprehension, detection and therapeutic manipulation of cellular demise.
Matthew F Krummel, Ph.D.
UC San Francisco
For the past 15 years, Prof. Dr. Krummel has studied mechanisms that regulate T cell responses and therefore regulate immune functions, using cutting-edge real-time imaging methods to ask these kinds of questions. As a graduate student, he developed expertise in the generation and use of monoclonal antibodies targeted to costimulatory and inhibitory molecules on T cells. One of these projects developed antibodies to CTLA-4, which not only identified an inhibitory pathway of T cell regulation but also were used to trigger or block that pathway. These antibodies were applied towards upregulating T cell responses to antigens in vivo and then toward augmenting immune responses in tumors. That approach led in time to the development of human antibodies of the same type, a therapy now named ‘ipilimumab’, FDA approved and widely used for treatment of melanoma and other cancers. His lab now focuses on figuring out how immune systems, collections of cells in complex tissues, work. His work capitalizes on using fluorescent proteins to track information processing by the immune system. One exceptionally useful approach that he developed is the generation of spontaneous models of breast cancer in which the stromal cells that interact with tumors become fluorescent by virtue of the uptake of very stable fluorescent protein variants. This enables focussing on specific phagocytes in the tumor microenvironments and to characterize them as primary players in transmitting signals to lymphocytes and regulating disease outcome.
Christian Kurts, Ph.D., M.D.
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität
Dr. Christian Kurts studied medicine and physics at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he received his MD in 1991. He subsequently worked as a clinician and research associate at Hannover Medical School and Aachen University clinic and holds board certifications in internal medicine and nephrology. From 1995 until 1998, he worked with J.F. Miller, F.R. Carbone and W.R. Heath on antigen cross-presentation and autoimmunity at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia. In 2003, he was appointed Professor of Molecular Immunology and in 2009, he became director of the Institute of Experimental Immunology at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Bonn, Germany. His research is focused at the cell biology and dynamics of antigen cross-presentation, at peripheral immune tolerance and at the biology of tissue dendritic cells. He received the Sir Hans Krebs award for basic medical research in 1999, a Heisenberg fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2000, the -U.-Zollinger-Award of the German Society for Nephrology in 2010 and the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Prize of the DFG in 2012. In 2014, he was elected as a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
Walter G. Land, M.D., Ph. D.
University of Strasbourg
Dr. Walter G. Land is the former Head of the Division of Transplantation Surgery at the Klinikum Grosshadern, University of Munich, and currently holds the position of a Professeur Conventionné at the Medical Faculty of the University of Strasbourg, France. After graduating he worked at the Institute of Surgical Research, University of Munich from 1967-1971. At that time, he produced a horse antilymphocyte serum, a powerful immunosuppressant, that he used to treat the first successful heart transplant patient, in cooperation with Chris Barnard, Cape Town, South Africa (in 1968). After specialized as a consultant in Surgery (1971-1975), he was the Head of the Munich Transplant Center from 1975-2004, where ~4000 kidney transplants and ~400 pancreas transplants were performed under his leadership. In 1979, he and his team performed the first pancreas transplantation in Germany; this was followed by the first unrelated kidney transplantation between a couple in Germany in 1994. Dr. Land’s research work included the clinical development of all immunosuppressive drugs that are currently used in transplant patients and patients suffering from autoimmune diseases. His experience in this field is published in a monograph (“Immunsuppressive Therapie”). Based on observations from a clinical trial in kidney transplant patients (“the Munich SOD trial”, 1994), he proposed the “danger/injury model” in immunology holding that it is the injury that induces immunity. Since that time until today, Dr. Land’s activities focus on publications (monographs, review articles) devoted to the introduction of the new immunological branch of Innate Immunity into the field of organ transplantation.
Antonio Lanzavecchia, M.D.
Institute for Research in Biomedicine
Dr. Antonio Lanzavecchia is the founding Director of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Bellinzona, Switzerland. He earned his degree in Medicine at the University of Pavia, where he specialized in Pediatrics and in Infectious Diseases. From 1983 to 1999 he was a Member of the Basel Institute for Immunology. He has been teaching at the University of Genoa and Siena since 2009 and is a Professor of Human Immunology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. Organizational memberships include the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the Royal College of Physicians. Dr. Lanzavecchia’s research has covered several aspects of human immunology: from antigen processing and presentation to dendritic cell biology and from lymphocyte activation and trafficking to T and B cell memory.
James Larkin M.D., Ph.D.
The Royal Marsden Hospital
Dr James Larkin is a Consultant Medical Oncologist specialising in the treatment of melanoma and cancers of the kidney. He took a first degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University and undertook clinical training at Oxford University, qualifying in 1996. He underwent general medical training in London and in 2001 won a Medical Research Council Fellowship at the ICR. He completed specialist training at The Royal Marsden and was appointed a Consultant in 2008. His research interests include the individualisation of patient treatment in kidney cancer and melanoma, and the use of novel targeted therapies and immunotherapies to treat these diseases. He has been UK and Global Chief Investigator for a number of clinical trials in melanoma and kidney cancer, many leading to the approval of new drugs for the treatment of advanced disease. He has been awarded research grants from bodies including Cancer Research UK, The Wellcome Trust and the European Framework Programme 7.
Juan J Lasarte, Ph.D.
Center for Applied Medical Research
Prof. Juan Lasarte graduated in Biological Sciences and obtained his Ph.D. Doctoral Thesis from the University of Navarra . After a post-doc period at the Pasteur Institute in Paris he became part of the staff of the Center for Applied Medical Research (CIMA). He is professor of Immunology at the University of Navarra and the Director of the Immunology and Immunotherapy program at CIMA. His scientific activity has been focused on the mechanisms of induction of cellular and humoral immune responses and the development of antiviral and antitumor vaccines using peptides, recombinant proteins, viral vectors or adoptive T cell based therapies. During the last years he has been working on the development of inhibitors of immunosuppressive molecules such as TGF-beta or the transcription factor FOXP3. He has participated in the publication of over 100 articles in international journals and has been co-inventor on 17 patents some of which applied in clinical trials.
Beth Levine, M.D., Ph.D.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Beth Levine was the Director of the Center for Autophagy Research and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas, USA. She received her M.D. from Cornell University Medical College, New York, USA, and undertook postdoctoral training in viral pathogenesis at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Her research focused on the biochemical regulation of beclin 1 and the physiological functions of beclin 1 and other autophagy proteins in antimicrobial host defence, tumour suppression, ageing and development. Beth Levine deceased June 15th 2020.
Hyam Levitsky, M.D.
Roche, Nutley
Hyam Levitsky is the Head of Cancer Immunology Experimental Medicine within the Pharma Research and Early Development (pRED) organization at Roche and holds an academic appointment at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, MD, USA. After receiving his BS degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science, Levitsky earned his MD at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He did his internship and residency in Internal Medicine on the Osler Medical Service at Johns Hopkins Hospital, rising to become Assistant Chief of Service. He trained in Medical Oncology as a Senior Clinical Fellow at Johns Hopkins Oncology Center and went from being an Assistant Professor of Oncology in 1991 to being a Professor of Oncology, Medicine, and Urology. He is recognized in the cancer immunotherapy community for his many contributions, such as: basic discoveries in antigen processing and presentation, T cell tolerance, lymphocyte homeostasis, vaccine development, and novel molecular imaging of anti-tumor immunity.
Roland Liblau, M.D., Ph.D.
Physiopathology Center of Toulouse-Purpan (CPTP)
Roland Liblau is the Director of the Physiopathology Center of Toulouse-Purpan, which is a biomedical research center that was created by INSERM in 2002. He started his scientific career at the Department of Clinical Immunology, INSERM in Paris, France. From 1993 to 1999 he was a member of the scientific staff at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford University, USA. Then, from 1999-2003, he was at the Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital, INSERM, Paris. Since 2004 he has been a professor at the Immunology Laboratory, Rangueil University Hospital, Toulouse, France. Dr. Liblau's main scientific interests are the study of CD8+-T, CD4+-T and NK-cells, cytokines and cytokine receptors and tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α) in various autoimmune diseases, such as diabetes 1, Crohns disease and multiple sclerosis (MS), and in experimental autoimmune diseases.
Andreas Linkermann, M.D., Ph.D.
University clinic of Dresden
Dr. Linkermann is currently faculty member at the University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus in Dresden, working as senior consultant nephrologist/clinician scientist with a special focus on transplantation and acute kidney injury. Until September 2016, he served as senior consultant nephrologist at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel, Germany, where he received his M.D. (summa cum laude) and served for the cluster of excellence "Inflammation at interfaces" as full member. His research focuses on the clinical relevance of signalling pathways of regulated necrosis, including necroptosis, ferroptosis and pyroptosis, in acute organ failure and cancer. A particular research focus is the interaction between dying cells and the immune system, referred to as necroinflammation, which may provide a working model for cancer immunotherapy and transplant rejection. He was awarded the Carl-Ludwig-Preis and the Franz-Volhard-Preis of the German Society of Nephrology, the Rudolf-Pichlmayr-Preis of the German Society of Transplantation and the Young Innovator Award by the American Society of Transplantation. In 2014, he was named Fellow of the American Society of Nephrology (FASN).
Yong-Jun Liu, M.D., Ph.D.
Baylor Research Institute (BRI)
Dr. Yong-Jun Liu serves as the Chief Scientific Officer and Vice President at Baylor Research Institute (BRI), TX, USA. Dr. Liu is known worldwide as an expert in immunology, particularly the function of immune cells that are central to fighting cancer. He joined Baylor from The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where he was Professor and Chair of the Department of Immunology, Director of the Center for Cancer Immunology Research, and Vivian L. Smith Distinguished Chair in Immunology. Before that, he was Senior Staff Scientist at the biotech company DNAX Research Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif.; Maitre De Recherche at Laboratory for Immunology Research at Schering-Plough in Dardilly, France; and Research Fellow in the Department of Immunology at the University of Birmingham, School of Medicine, in Birmingham, England. He earned his M.D. degree from Norman Bethune University, China in 1984 and his Ph.D. degree in Immunology from the University of Birmingham, UK in 1989.
Michael Lotze, B.Med.Sc., M.D., Ph.D.
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Dr. Michael T. Lotze is Professor of Surgery and Bioengineering; Vice Chair of Research within the Department of Surgery; Asst. Vice Chancellor in the six schools of the Health Sciences at Pittsburgh; and Director of Strategic Partnerships within the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute as well as the Catalyst Program within the recently funded Clinical and Translational Research Institute. Dr. Lotze received his M.D., B.Med.Sci., and Ph.D. from Northwestern University within the Honors Program in Medical Education. His academic career included surgical training at the University of Rochester and fellowships at both the M.D. Anderson Institute and the National Cancer Institute. He was Senior Investigator in the Surgery Branch of the NCI from 1982-1990 and founding Director and Chief of the Division of Surgical Oncology at Pittsburgh from 1990-2000. Until 2001 he served as Vice-President for Discovery Research in Inflammation and Oncology at SmithKline Beecham and Vice President of High Throughput Biology within Discovery Research in GlaxoSmithKline. He is the co-inventor of 10 patents in dendritic cell vaccines and antigen discovery and serves as associate editor of the "Journal of Immunotherapy”.
Ofer Mandelboim, Ph.D.
The Hebrew University Hadassha Medical School Jerusalem
Prof. Mandelboim obtained his MSc and PhD degrees from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He conducted postdoctoral studies with Prof. Jack Strominger at Harvard University. Since 2000 he is at the Hebrew University studying the biology of Natural Killer cells.
Alberto Mantovani, M.D.
University of Milan
Alberto Mantovani is Scientific Director of Istituto Clinico Humanitas, President and founder of the Fondazione Humanitas per la Ricerca, and Professor of Pathology in the School of Medicine at the State University of Milan. He graduated in 1973 with a degree in Medicine from the University of Milan and in 1976 he specialized in Oncology at the University of Pavia. He completed fellowships at the Laboratory of Immunology and Chemotherapy at the Mario Negri Institute in Milano, the Department of Tumor Immunology of the Chester Research Institute in Belmont (GB), and the Laboratory of Immunodiagnosis, NIH, Bethesda (USA). He has held held many different research and faculty positions at prominent institutions. From 1979 to 1981 he was Senior investigator, Department of Tumor Immunology and Chemotherapy, Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche "Mario Negri", Milan. In 1981 he became Chief of the Laboratory of Immunology, Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche "Mario Negri". From 1994 to 2001 he was full Professor of General Pathology, School of Medicine, University of Brescia, Italy. He has also led the Department of Immunology and Cell Biology at the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche "Mario Negri", Milan from 1996 to 2005. His research centers mainly on molecular regulation mechanisms of leukocyte infiltration. More specifically his attention is focused on the molecular function and regulation circuits of the inflammatory cytokines.
Eugene Maraskovsky, Ph.D.
CSL Biotherapies
Dr. Eugene Maraskovsky is the Senior Director and Head of Cell Biology and Physiology at CSL Biotherapies. He completed his Ph.D. in Immunology at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in 1991. He worked at Immunex Corporation, Seattle, where he rose to Senior Scientist and Project Leader working on cytokine discovery and translational research. In 1998 he joined the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Australia, as Joint Head of the Cancer Vaccine Laboratory. In 2002 he joined CSL Limited as a Principal Scientist and Group Leader.
Francesco Marincola, M.D.
National Institute of Health
Dr. Marincola is Chief of the Infectious Disease and Immunogenetics Section in the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Heath in Bethesda, MD, USA. He received his M.D. from the University of Milan and his surgery training at Stanford University, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in surgical research. He joined the Surgical Oncology Branch of the National Cancer Institute, NIH, in 1990. Dr. Marincola is a NIH tenured senior investigator, Adjunct Professor, Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China, Adjunct Professor, First Military Medical University, Tonghe, Guangzhou – China, and a Member of the Board of Directors, International Society for Biological Therapy of Cancer. He also serves many editorial roles for academic journals in the field of cancer research, as well as founded the "Journal of Translational Medicine" in 2003.
Carlos Martinez-Alonso, Ph.D.
Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
Carlos Martínez-A. was the president of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and professor of immunology at the CSIC, Spain. He now is a Professor of Immunology at the CSIC. He earned his Ph.D. in 1978 from the Clínica Puerta de Hierro and the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain. He was a member of the Basel Institute for Immunology until 1981, and subsequently held research positions at the University of Umeå, Sweden, the Clínica Puerta de Hierro, Spain, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France. He has been visiting professor at the Ontario Cancer Institute, Toronto, Canada, the Max Planck Institute for Immunology in Freiburg, Germany, and the California Institute of Technology, USA. He became Full Professor at the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) in 1986, working first in the Centro de Biología Molecular and later in the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología, where he formed the Department of Immunology and Oncology (DIO) in 1993. Dr. Martinez has studied leukocytes in several fields from cellular immunology to autoimmune disease. With his co-workers, he has studied lymphocyte activation, the role of chemotactic responses in physiological and pathological settings, and the molecular mechanisms implicated in the control of cell death and autoimmunity.
Ignacio Melero, M.D, Ph.D.
Clinica Universidad de Navarra and CIMA.
Ignacio Melero earned a MD degree from the University of Navarra and was trained as a resident in clinical immunology. He also attained a PhD degree working with Dr. Miguel Lopez-Botet pioneering the characterization of NK cell inhibitory receptors (KIRs) He moved to Seattle (USA) where he worked on tumor immunology and immunotherapy, studying T cell ignorance of tumor antigens and the role of T-cell costimulation in mouse models of cancer. His studies of that time on CD137-mediated co-stimulation of curative antitumor immune responses have received much attention by the immunotherapy of cancer community and have resulted in therapeutic agents undergoing phase II clinical trials. Following he returned to Spain where he currently serves as a full professor of Immunology at the Clinica Universidad de Navarra and at CIMA. His current areas of research are focused on from bench to bed side translational research with cell, gene and monoclonal antibody-mediated strategies of immunotherapy for cancer. Dr. Melero has authored over 160 indexed publications attaining an h factor of 39 with over 5,000 citations in the biomedical literature. He has been awarded the BIAL Medicine award, Conde de Cartagena award from the Royal academy of Medicine, and Doctor Durantez LAIR Foundation award.
Cornelis (Kees) J. Melief, M.D., Ph.D.
Leiden University Medical Center
Dr. Cornelis (Kees) Melief was Head of the Dept. of Immunohematology and Blood Transfusion at the Leiden University Medical Center in The Netherlands. He received his M.D. degree in 1970 and his Ph.D. degree in 1967 from the University of Amsterdam. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the New England Medical Center and Dana Farber Cancer Center, Boston, USA. In 1975 he became a staff member of the Netherlands Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service and in 1985 he became the head of the Dept. of Tumor Immunology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam. Dr. Melief is now an emeritus professor at Leiden University Medical Center and the Chief Scientific Officer at ISA Pharmaceutical. Dr. Melief’s work has contributed fundamental insights into the cellular and molecular mechanisms governing the generation of cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) responses. He has also pioneered the use the of CTL-dependent responses in adoptive immunotherapy of cancer, providing the first evidence that CTLs specific for an oncogene tumor antigen could eradicate large vascularized tumors in mice.
Ira Mellman, Ph.D.
Genentech, Inc.
Dr. Ira Mellman is Vice President of the Research Oncology group at Genentech. He earned his Ph.D. degree in genetics from Yale University School of Medicine, CT, USA in 1978 and did his postdoctoral fellowship at The Rockefeller University, NY from 1978-1980. During his academic career he held professorships at Yale University School of Medicine and University of Oxford and was an affiliate member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. Most recently he was the Chair of the Cell Biology Department at Yale University School of Medicine. Two key problems that Dr. Mellman’s lab focuses on are the generation and maintenance of cell polarity and the cell biological basis of the immune response. He has been elected to numerous honorable memberships, including to the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2005 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.
Miriam Merad, M.D., Ph.D.
The Mount Sinai Hospital
Miriam Merad is a Professor of Oncological Studies and Medicine at The Mount Sinai Hospital, NY, USA. She received her M.D. from University of Algiers, Algeria and her Ph.D. jointly from Stanford University and University Paris VII. Her research interests include functional diversity of non-lymphoid tissue dendritic cells, vaccination stragtegies for the treatment of hematological malignancies, and in vivo manipulation of dendritic cells to induce antitumor immunity. Dr. Merad made several contributions to the field of Langerhans cell biology and recently identified a new langerin+ dendritic cell lineage independent of Langerhans cells that may contribute to LCH pathophysiology. These studies have been published in prestigious journals such as "Nature Immunology" and "Nature Medicine". She has had several grant awards from the National Health Institute to study dendritic cell and Langerhans cell biology.
Alessandro Moretta, M.D., Ph.D.
University of Genoa
Alessandro Moretta was a Professor of Experimental Medicine at Genoa University, Italy and one of the cofounders of French biotechnology company Innate Pharma. Innate Pharma was founded in 1999 and the company focuses on the manipulation of non-conventional lymphocytes, including NK cells, to develop immune-modulating medications and cellular therapies. Dr. Moretta has had articles published in journals such as “Blood” and “European Journal of Immunology”. He was also the winner of the European Yvette Mayent Insisute Curie prize in 2001 for his research on innate immunity. Alessandro Moretta deceased February 7th 2018
Lorenzo Moretta, Ph.D.
Istituto G. Gaslini
Lorenzo Moretta is a full Professor at the University of Genova and the Scientific Director of the Istituto G. Gaslini in Genova, Italy. He received his scientific training at the Medical School of the University of Genova. In 2001 he was awarded the Novartis Prize for Basic Immunology for his scientific contribution to the understanding of Natural Killer cells and their molecular basis for their function. He has been published in numerous journals, is on the editorial board of journals such as “Tends in Immunology” and “European Journal of Immunology”, and is a highly cited scientist for his field.
Sergei Nedospasov, Ph.D., D.Sc.
Moscow State University / Russian Academy of Sciences
Dr. Nedospasov is the Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Mechanisms of Immunity at the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology, Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow, and the Chairman of the Department of Immunology, at Lomonosov Moscow State University. He received his Ph.D. and D.Sc. from the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology. His past appointments include National Cancer Institute (Frederick, MD) and German Rheumatism Research Center, a Leibniz Institute, in Berlin, Germany. From 1995 to 2010 he was HHMI International Research Scholar. Dr. Nedospasov has received many honors in his country and abroad, including Helmholtz-Humboldt Award in 2005, and Russian Federation State Prize for Science and Technologies in 2015. He is elected Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2003. His current projects are focused on the role of cytokines in immunity and cancer.
Lloyd Old, M.D.
Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research
Lloyd Old was the Director of Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR), New York Branch, and the William E. Snee Chair in Immunology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Previously, he was chairman, director, and chief executive officer of LICR. He has been associated with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center since 1958 and he was appointed associate director of research in 1973 of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases. Dr. Old is internationally recognized as one of the founders of the field of tumor immunology. In 2007, Dr. Old received the Charles Rodolphe Brupbacher Cancer Research Award at a prize ceremony during the 8th Charles Rodolphe Brupbacher Symposium held in Zürich, Switzerland for his discoveries in the fields of cancer immunosurveillance and immunotherapy. Lloyd Old deceased November 28th 2011.
Christian Ottensmeier, M.D., Ph.D.
University of Southampton
Christian Ottensmeier is Professor in Experimental Cancer Medicine. He graduated and began his training in Münster, Germany. After his training at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute he moved to Southampton where he completed his oncology training and earned his Ph.D. He has been a consultant in medical oncology since 2000. Christian is co-Director of the Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre in Southampton and his core academic interest is the early translation of immunotherapeutic strategies into the clinic. His clinical interests are thoracic malignancies and melanoma, and he has co-developed a number of national NCRI studies in lung cancer. He manages a broad and active portfolio of clinical trials in both lung cancer and melanoma. The overarching aim of his laboratory group is the preclinical development and early phase clinical testing of strategies to induce anti-tumour immune responses in patients. His work focuses on linked but distinct areas of investigation: Detailed evaluation of the effect of immunological intervention in patients, assay development and validation, and mechanistic studies in murine models as well as human modelling of immune responses to vaccination for further cancer vaccine development. He has served on a number of industry advisory boards and DSMBs for industry led studies and is also a member of the Clinical Development partnership between Cancer Research UK and Astra Zeneca. He is a member of a number of national peer reviewed funding committees.
Frank Pagès, M.D., Ph.D.
Hôpital Européen Georges Pompidou (HEGP)
Franck Pagès obtained his medical degree from the University Paris Diderot, France. He is now a Full Professor of Immunology at the Medical school, University Paris Descartes. He is the vice-chairman of the department of Immunology at the Hôpital Européen Georges Pompidou in Paris. Pr. Franck Pagès head the immunomonitoring plateform of the department of Immunology, to assess and quantify the immune infiltrate in tumors (eg. the “immunoscore”). He is a senior researcher and a group leader in the team “Integrative Cancer Immunology Team” headed by J. Galon at the Cordelier Research Center. His main interests are tumor immunology with a translational approach from fundamental research to immunotherapy of cancer.
Anna Karolina Palucka, M.D., Ph.D.
Baylor Insitute for Immunology Research, TX, USA
Dr. Anna Karolina is an Investigator at the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research and an Adjunct Professor for Biomedical Studies at Baylor University Medical Center. She received her M.D. from the Warsaw Medical Academy, Poland in 1984 and her Ph.D. from the Karolinska Hospital and Institute, Sweden in 1993. She held post-doctoral fellowships at the Hematology Laboratory, Karolinska Hospital, Sweden and the Immunology Laboratory, Hopital Pitie-Salpetriere, France. She accepted a Senior Research Associate position at Baylor Institute for Immunology Research, TX in 1998 and has continued apart of the research faculty till the present. Dr. Palucka and her team focus on understanding how the human immune system works and how it may be manipulated to fight cancer. She also leads a project to develop a mouse model of the human immune system, which is being used to study human tumors and how they influence dendritic cell function.
Drew Pardoll, M.D., Ph.D.
Johns Hopkins Medical Institute
Dr. Drew Pardoll is a Professor and Co-Director of the Cancer Immunology and Hematopoiesis Program at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center of Johns Hopkins University, MD, USA. He earned his M.D. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and has been there throughout his career except for a brief hiatus for a fellowship with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, Bethesda, MD. He is a member of numerous professional societies, scientific advisory boards and National Institute of Health review groups and task forces. He has also received many honors, most recently the Seraph Chair in Oncology at JHU. Dr. Pardoll’s laboratory studies the molecular regulation of T cell immune responses and applies these findings to the design of enhanced Cancer Immunotherapies based on breaking tolerance to tumor antigens. Specifically, the laboratory investigates dendritic cell activation, regulation of tolerance, and the role of Stat3 signaling in modulating the immune microenvironment of cancer.
Giorgio Parmiani, Ph.D.
Fondazione San Raffaele del Monte Tabor, Italy
Giogio Parmiani deceased in March 2021.
Josef Penninger, M.D.
Institute of Molecular Biotechnology
Josef Penninger is the Scientific Director of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, Austria. He is also currently a Professor for the Departments of Immunology and Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto, Professor of Genetics at the University of Vienna, Austria, and Honorary Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences/Peking Union Medical College. The approach of the Penninger group is to genetically manipulate and change genes in mice and to determine the effects of these changes on the development of the mouse and in diseases. His group has developed new models in flies to model diseases at the whole genome level and compare the models with human SNP maps. Penninger has received various prizes and honors such as the "Highest Talented" Award from the Rotary Club Innsbruck (1990); Canadian Research Chair in Cell Biology (2001); Austrian Academy of Sciences (2002); International Research Prize in Bone Research (2003); Austrian Scientist of the Year Award (2003); German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2004); and Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (2005).
Marco Pierotti, Ph.D.
Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori
Dr. Pierotti graduated in Biological Sciences at the University of Milan. From 1978 to 1980 he was Visiting Investigator at the Laboratory of Chemical Cancerogenesis of the NCI-NIH Bethesda, MD and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Viral Oncology of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York, USA. In 2006, Dr Pierotti was appointed Scientific Director of the Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan where, since the 1970s, he had held various positions. He has also been Group Leader of Molecular Genetics of Cancer at the Institute FIRC of Molecular Oncology, IFOM, Milan and, since 1988, he has been Professor of Molecular Genetics of Cancer at the Postgraduate School of Oncology, University of Milan Medical School. Since 2006 he has been the Scientific Director of the Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Italy. His research interests include molecular mechanisms of neoplastic transformation and genetic predisposition to cancer in experimental and human models. He has held many positions in Cancer Organizations and has received numerous awards, including the “2001 International Idea Award”.
Philippe Pierre, Ph.D.
CIML Immunology
Dr. Philippe Pierre is the Group Leader for the Dendritic Cell Biology Laboratory at CIML Immunology. Research interests include control of translation in dendritic cell function, control of MHC class I traffic and presentation in dendritic cells, dendritic cell specific endosomal proteins, and brucella infection and dendritic cell function. He received his Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Geneva and held a postdoctoral fellowship and associate research scientist position at Yale University School of Medicine, USA from 1994 to 1999. He joined CIML as a Group Leader in 2000 and held the title of Associate Director from 2006 to 2008. Main achievements include characterization of the cytoplasmic linker protein of 170 Kd (CLIP-170) and its cap-Gly Microtubule binding domain and the elucidation of MHC class II traffic in antigen presenting cells.
Michael Platten, M.D.
German Cancer Research Center and National Center for Tumor Diseases
Michael Platten has been a Professor of Neuroimmunology since 2010. He received his medical degree from the University of Bonn and was board certified as a neurologists by the University of Tübingen, Germany. Michael Platten heads the Department of Neuroimmunol- ogy and Brain Tumor Immunology at the German Cancer Research Institute and the Immune Monitoring Unit at the National Center for Tumor Diseases in Heidelberg. He is also Vice Chair of the Department of Neurology at the Heidelberg University Hospital. His clinical and basic research work focuses on the development of novel immunotherapeutic approaches to brain tumors. The work of his group has given insights into mechanisms of tumor-associated immune suppression through tryptophan catabolism. More recently, his group has been exploiting mutated neoantigens for glioma vaccination.
George C. Prendergast, Ph.D.
The Lankenau Institute for Medical Research
Dr. Prendergast is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania where he received his BA in Biochemistry in 1983. He obtained his MS in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 1984 and his PhD in Molecular Biology from Princeton University in 1989. He is Professor, President & CEO at the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research. Prior to his arrival at LIMR, Dr. Prendergast pursued advanced training as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at NYU Medical Center, after which he joined the Department of Cancer Research at Merck Research Laboratories. In 1993, Dr. Prendergast was appointed Assistant Professor and later Associate Professor at The Wistar Institute, where in 1995 he was designated a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences. In 1999, he returned to industry leading the Cancer Research Group at The DuPont Pharmaceutical Company as Senior Director. Dr. Prendergast is Professor, Department of Pathology, Anatomy and Cell Biology, Jefferson Medical College, and Co-Leader, Cancer Cell Biology and Signaling Program, Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
Ellen Puré, Ph.D.
Institution: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. PA
Dr. Ellen Puré is the Grace Lansing Lambert Professor and Chair of Biomedical Sciences and the founding Director of the Penn Vet Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. She received her Baccalaureate degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri in 1977 and her doctorate from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in 1981. She trained as a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Postdoctoral Fellow and Leukemia Society Special Fellow and in 1984 joined the Faculty at the Rockefeller University. In 1992 Dr. Puré moved to Philadelphia where she was on the Faculty of the Wistar Institute and from 1997-2008 she served as Director of the Office of Academic Affairs for the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. Dr. Puré moved to her current position at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. Dr. Puré’s research focuses on the cellular and molecular basis of inflammation and fibrosis. She studies the basic mechanisms involved in these processes and the contribution of these processes to disease with a particular emphasis on cancer. Her laboratory is defining the role of stromal cells, extracellular matrix (ECM) and matrix remodeling in cancer initiation, progression, metastasis and modulation of anti-tumor immunity. They are currently developing novel therapeutic approaches that target the stromal compartment of tumors to use in combination with more conventional therapies that target malignant cells and anti-angiogenic therapies. Dr. Puré was a Pew Scholar, an American Heart Established Fellow, the Crawford-Maynard Established Fellow of the American Heart Association and recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award-University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, an Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America Investigator Award and the Arthritis Foundation-Stewart J. McCracken Chapter Award for Research.
Andreas Radbruch, Ph.D.
German Rheumatism Research Center
Dr. Andreas Radbruch is the Scientific Director of the German Rheumatism Research Center, Berlin (DRFZ), Germany. Fields of interest include the molecular basis of immunological memory, long-lived plasma cells, control of autoimmunity, cytokine gene expression, flow cytometry and cell sorting. He has been the recipient of many prestigious awards including the Karl-Heinz Beckurts Award in 1994, the Aronson Award in 2000 and the Federal Cross of Merit in 2008.
Rino Rappuoli, Ph.D.
Novartis Vaccine & Diagnostics
Dr. Rino Rappnoli is the Global Head of Vaccines Research for Novartis Vaccines & Diasgnostics, Italy. He is credited with co-founding the field of “cellular microbiology” and has pioneered the genomic approach to vaccine development called “reverse vaccinology”. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Siena and, after completing a fellowship at Siena’s Sclavo Research Center, served as a visiting scientist at Rockefeller University in New York and Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA. In 1983 he was made responsible for the Vaccines Division of Sclavo and moved up to become the head of the Sclavo Division of Vaccine Research and Development. Dr. Rappuoli joined Chiron in 1992 as head of research and development when Chiron acquired Sclavo. Dr. Rappnoli has recieved many awards over his career, such as the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize in 1991, the Dr. Friedrich Sasse Award in 1998, and the Albert B. Sabin Gold Medal Award in 2009.
David Raulet, Ph.D.
University of California, Berkeley
Dr. Raulet earned his B.S. (Microbiology) at the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. (Biology) at MIT. He is currently a Professor of Immunology and Pathogenesis at the University of California, Berkeley. The research focus of his lab is in understanding how natural killer (NK) cells and T cells recognize and destroy diseased cells, how their recognition apparatus is coordinated with differentiation of immune cells, and how this information can be used for therapy or prevention of disease.
Maria Rescigno Ph.D.
European Institute of Oncology, University of Milan
Maria Rescigno graduated in Biology in 1990 at the University of Milan. From 1991 to 1994 she worked at the University of Cambridge, UK, in the Department of Biochemistry, as a visiting scholar. From 1995 to 1999, she worked at the National Research Council of Milan where she received her PhD in Pharmacology and toxicology in 1999. Since 2001 she is the director of the Dendritic cell biology and immunotherapy Unit at the Department of Experimental Oncology at the European Institute of oncology. She was the first to show that dendritic cells in the gut actively participate to bacterial uptake. Her major field of interest is the development of new immunotherapy strategies to fight cancer. She authored more than 120 publications in high impact journals including Nature Immunol, Immunity, J. Exp. Med., Science. She was nominated EMBO young investigator in 2007. Since 2008 she is visiting professor at the University of Oslo. She is the recipient of two ERC grants (starting and consolidator). In 2011 Maria Rescigno won the Avon prize as ‘Woman symbol of the city of Milan’ and was elected EMBO member. From 2014 she is Associate Professor at the University of Milan. H-index : 50.
Caetano Reis e Sousa, Ph.D.
Cancer Research UK London Research Institute
Caetano Reis e Sousa obtained a BSc(Hons) in Biology in 1989 from Imperial College, London, and a DPhil in Immunology in 1992 from the University of Oxford. He subsequently trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health, USA. In 1998, he joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, now Cancer Research UK London Research Institute (LRI), as head of the Immunobiology Laboratory. He is currently a Senior Scientist at LRI and holds Honorary Professorships at University College London and Queen Mary, London. Caetano’s research centers on the regulation of adaptive immunity by antigen-presenting cells and on the innate mechanisms involved in sensing pathogen presence.
Nick Restifo, M.D.
National Cancer Institute
Dr. Restifo, a 1983 honors graduate from Johns Hopkins University, obtained his M.D. in 1987 from New York University. He held fellowships at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the NCI before becoming a principal investigator in 1993. He is currently a Senior Investigator with the Center for Cancer Research, NCI in Bethesda, MD.
Antoni Ribas, M.D., Ph.D.
UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center
Paola Ricciardi Castagnoli, Ph.D.
A*STAR Centre of Immunology SIgN
Since 1998 Professor Paola Ricciardi Castagnoli has been directing and promoting the Genopolis Consortium of Functional Genomics. She has been the Chair of Immunology and General Pathology at the University of Milano-Bicocca and is presently the Scientific Director of the A*STAR Centre of Immunology SIgN, at Biopolis in Singapore. From 1975-1998 she was a member of the National Research Council, a Visiting Scientist at MIT, and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. The European Union awarded Prof. Castagnoli the prestigious Marie Curie Chair at the Institut Pasteur of Paris where she is also a member of the Scientific Council. Since 2002 she has been the President of the European Network of Immunology Institutes (ENII) and she directs the ENII Summer School in Advanced Immunology.
Gert Riethmüller, M.D., Ph.D.
Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München
Dr. Gert Riethmüller is a Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany. He has published articles in journals such as "Cancer Cell", "Journal of Immunology Methods", and "Clinical Cancer Research".
Bruce H. Robinson, Ph.D.
University of Washington
Dr. Robinson is an experimental and theoretical, biophysical chemist in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in Biophysical and Physical Chemistry from Vanderbilt University in 1975. His group specializes in using a variety of Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) techniques, including continuous wave and pulsed Saturation Recovery (pSR) and pulsed Electron-Electron Double Resonance (pELDOR) EPR at 2 and 10 GHz. The research areas of interest include: dynamics of B-form duplex DNA and protein-DNA binding (as part of the process of DNA recognition); protein-RNA interactions; the interaction of interfacial signaling proteins and membranes; and the organization of organic chromophores in polymer matrices.
Benedita Barata de Rocha, M.D., Ph.D.
INSERM
Benedita Barata da Rocha is an immunologist. She is Portuguese and was born in Lisbon. She earned her M.D. in 1972 from the University of Lisbon and her Ph.D. in 1978 from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. She is DR1 of the CNRS and director of a research unit of the INSERM at the Necker Institute [1], Paris, France. Her major scientific contributions are in the areas of T cell biology and T cell memory.
Pedro Romero, M.D.
Department of Fundamental Oncology, Faculty of Biology and Medicine, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Prof. Pedro Romero is the Associate Director of the Department of Fundamental Oncology at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine, University of Lausanne. He obtained his MD at the School of Medicine of the National University of Colombia in Bogota. Then he performed experimental work in the field of immunology of malaria and participated in the development of malaria vaccines, initially at the Institute of Immunology, Faculty of Medicine, National University of Colombia in Bogota, and then as a postdoctoral fellow at the New York University School of Medicine. He joined the Lausanne branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in 1989. He has been actively involved in pre-clinical and translational research in tumor immunology and immunotherapy. His main interests focus on the study of human tumor antigens, T-cell responses and immunotherapy of human tumors. He is a Section Editor of the Journal of Immunology and the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer and has co-authored over 260 publications in peer-reviewed journals.
Maria Grazia Roncarolo, M.D.
San Raffaele Scientific Institute
Since 1998 Dr. Roncarolo has been working at the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy, of which she was the Director from 2000 to 2008. She has a long-standing interest in the mechanisms that induce and maintain tolerance in bone marrow and organ transplantation, autoimmune diseases, and gene therapy. Her group was a leader in the demonstration and biological characterization of the first subset of inducible regulatory T cells named T regulatory type 1 cells. In addition, she was instrumental in the characterization of human natural regulatory T cells and in methods for in vivo or ex vivo Treg expansion. She is now actively investigating novel drugs (biological and small molecular weight compounds) that drive the differentiation and expansions of tolerogenic DC and/or antigen specific Tregs.
Steven A. Rosenberg, M.D., Ph.D.
National Cancer Institute
Dr. Rosenberg is Chief of Surgery at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland and a Professor of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences and at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, D.C. Dr. Rosenberg received his B.A. and M.D. degree at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and a Ph.D. in Biophysics at Harvard University. After completing his residency training in surgery in 1974 at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts Dr. Rosenberg became the Chief of Surgery at the National Cancer Institute, a position he has held to the present time.
David C Rubinsztein, Ph.D.
Cambridge Institute for Medical Research
David Rubinsztein is Professor of Molecular Neurogenetics, Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and Honorary Consultant in Medical Genetics. He is also deputy director of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research and Academic Lead of the Alzheimer’s Research UK Cambridge Drug Discovery Institute. David Rubinsztein was appointed to a personal readership at the University of Cambridge in 2003 and was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2004. In 2005 he was promoted to Professor of Molecular Neurogenetics at the University of Cambridge (personal chair). He was awarded the Graham Bull Prize for Clinical Science (Royal College of Physicians) in 2007 and was elected as a member of EMBO in 2011. In 2014 and 2015, he was selected as one of Thomson Reuters’ Highly Cited Researchers (http://highlycited.com/). His research is focused on trying to understand the processes underlying the pathology in Huntington’s disease and related conditions associated with intracellular aggregates. He is trying to use the understanding of the pathobiology of these diseases to develop therapeutic strategies and has a particular interest in autophagy in this context. His group use a range of approaches to address these aims, from cell biology to fly and mouse models.
Federica Sallusto, Ph.D.
Institute for Research in Biomedicine
Dr. Federica Sallusto received the degree of Doctor in Biology from the University of Rome and performed postdoctoral training at the Italian Institute of Health in Rome (ISS) and at the Basel Institute for Immunology (BII). In two groundbreaking papers published in 1994 and 1995, she reported that monocytes are precursors of DCs and showed that DC maturation could be induced by microbial stimuli. In 1995, she started her own group at the ISS focusing on allergies and after two years she moved to the BII where she started a new line of research on T cell trafficking. Her studies revealed a differential expression of chemokine receptors in human Th1 and Th2 cells leading to the characterization of “central memory” and “effector memory” T cells as memory subsets with distinct migratory capacity and function. Since 2000, she is a group leader at the IRB. Among her recent contributions are the epigenetic control of cytokine gene expression in human T cells and the characterization of Th17 and Th22 cells. To complement her work in the field of human immunology, she started a line of research to study in vivo lymphocyte migration in the mouse system. These studies have challenged current dogma by identifying new mechanisms of lymphocyte migration in inflamed lymph nodes and in the brain. She received the Pharmacia Foundation Award in 1999, the Behring Lecture Prize in 2009, and the Award of the Foundation for Study of Neurodegenerative Diseases in 2010. Since 2010 she is member of the German Academy of Science Leopoldina.
Catherine Sautès-Fridman, Ph.D.
Université Paris Descartes
Catherine Sautès-Fridman is head of the Immunology, Cancer and Inflammation Department and leader of the Immune Microenvironment and Tumors group at Université Paris Descartes, France. She is also President of the European Federation of Immunological Societies. Her scientific achievements have been in the field of immunogenetics (description of the association of b2-microglobulin to HLA antigens, of the H-2L Locus) and of Fc gamma R (biological activity of soluble FcgR, tridimensional structure), and more recently tumor immune escape mechanisms (expression of FcgR and TLR7).
Dolores Schendel, Ph.D.
Helmholtz Zentrum München
Professor Schendel is head of the Institute for Molecular Immunology at the Helmholtz Zentrum München - German Research Center for Environmental Health. Her major research interest is to define the molecular and cellular basis of anti-tumor immunity, with particular emphasis on T cell recognition. Based on these findings new immunotherapies are developed for clinical trials.
Hans Schreiber, M.D., Ph.D
University of Chicago
Dr. Hans Schreiber is a Professor of Pathology in the Cancer Research Center at The University of Chicago, IL, USA. He received his M.D. and D.M.Sc. from the University of Freiburg and his Ph.D. from The University of Chicago. The main focus of his laboratory is to study the fundamental mechanisms that govern the interaction of cancer cells with the immune system. In particular, they are trying to exploit the fact that cancer cells usually carry cancer-specific mutations and antigens, and that, under certain conditions, the immune system can destroy cancer cells even after they have disseminated in the body. His research has been published in "European Journal of Immunology", "Journal of Immunology", and numerous others.
Robert Schreiber, Ph.D.
Washington University School of Medicine
Dr. Rober Schreiber is an Alumni Professor of Pathology and Immunology and a Professor of Molecular Microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine, MO, USA. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Immunology from State University of New York, Buffalo in 1973. He completed postdoctoral fellowship at State University of New York, Buffalo in 1973 and Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA from 1973 to 1976. Dr. Schreiber has also been leader of the Tumor Immunology Program at Siteman Cancer Center and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Honors he has received include The William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology from the Cancer Research Institute, The Charles Rodolphe Brupbacher Prize for Cancer Research, and the Distinguished Investigator Award from the Washington University School of Medicine.
Gerold Schuler, M.D.
Hautklinik Universitätsklinikum Erlangen
Dr. Schuler, director and chairman of the Department of Dermatology, University Hospital of Erlangen, devotes much of his research to the study of the human immune system, in particular cellular immunity. Schuler has published research on dendritic cell (DC) maturation, the production of Interleukin-12 via DCs and myeloid DCs. He has also published studies on the first “proof of principle” that DC tumor specific cytotoxic and Type 1 helper T-cells can be induced in vitro and in vivo in humans, the first functional characterization of the CD83 molecule on DC, and the identification of regulatory T cells. Schuler received his M.D., with distinction, at Leopold-Franzens-University of Innsbruck, Austria in 1975. He completed his research fellowship at the Institute for Histology and Embryology and Institute for Biochemical Pharmacology, University of Innsbruck, Austria in 1977.
Ton Schumacher, Ph.D.
The Netherlands Cancer Institute.
Dr. Ton Schumacher is Senior Member at The Netherlands Cancer Institute. The key biomedical question his lab has addressed is how T cells can recognize human tumors, and how such T cell recognition can be maximized by therapeutic intervention. Schumacher is recipient of, amongst others, the Amsterdam Inventor Award, Queen Wilhelmina Research Award, San Salvatore Award, and Coley Award. He is founder of 3 biotechs that focus on therapeutic manipulation of human immune responses, and is Professor of Immunotechnology at Leiden University.
Barbara Seliger, Ph.D.
Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
Prof. Dr. Barbara Seliger is the Director of the Institute for Medical Immunology at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, in Halle, Germany, Director of a FOCIS Center of Excellence, member of the World Immunoscore and SITC biomarker initiatives. In addition she is head of the work group for “Tumor immunology” of the German Society of Immunology. Prof. Seliger’s research team studies the molecular events associated with immune escape of tumors, the role of the tumor microenvironment and immune cell subpopulations for tumor development and therapy resistance. One major goal is to understand the molecular mechanisms, by which tumor cells modulate the immune response in order to escape immune surveillance. This includes immune check point pathways and abnormalities of HLA class I and class II antigens as well as of HLA-G. In addition, her laboratory is involved in optimization and monitoring immunotherapies and in the characterization of biomarkers allowing the prediction of their success. Recently, she became interested in the identification, functional characterization and clinical relevance of immune regulatory microRNAs, RNA-binding proteins and their implementation as therapeutic tools as well as in the role of the tumor metabolism in immune surveillance and its modulation as novel therapeutic option. During her scientific life she did win a number of awards including the ARF Award of the Qatar Foundation 2015.
Padmanee Sharma, M.D., Ph.D.
MD Anderson Cancer Center
Arlene H Sharpe, M.D., Ph.D.
Harvard Medical School
Arlene Sharpe M.D. Ph.D. is the George Fabyan Professor of Comparative Pathology and Head of the Division of Immunology in the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School. She is a member of the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Leader of the Cancer Immunology Program at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. Dr. Sharpe is the Co-Director of the Evergrande Center for Immunologic Diseases at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Sharpe earned her M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard Medical School. She completed residency training in Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and is board certified in Anatomic Pathology. Dr. Sharpe is a leader in the field of T cell costimulation, and investigates how costimulatory pathways regulate immune responses. Her laboratory has discovered and elucidated the functions of T cell costimulatory pathways, including the immunoinhibitory functions of the CTLA-4 and PD-1 pathways, which have become exceptionally promising targets for cancer immunotherapy. Her laboratory currently focuses on the roles of T cell costimulatory pathways in regulating T cell tolerance and effective antimicrobial and antitumor immunity. Her laboratory is also involved in studies aimed at translating fundamental understanding of T cell costimulation into new therapies for autoimmune diseases and cancer. Dr. Sharpe has published over 300 papers and was listed by Thomas Reuters as one of the most Highly Cited Researchers (top 1%) in 2014 and 2015. She received the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor immunology in 2014 for her contributions to the discovery of PD-1 pathway.
Antonio Sica, Ph.D.
Istituto Clinico Humanitas
Dr. Antonio Sica obtained his Ph.D. in Pharmacology at the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri, Milan. During his scientific career he has provided contributions to the field of Inflammation and Immunity. He first described the divergent regulation of chemokine receptors and ligands, in response to pro- and anti-inflammatory signals and its implication for the trafficking of immune cells at sites of inflammation. During the last ten years he focused his attention on the investigation of inflammatory cells and molecules expressed within the tumor microenvironment and their role in tumor development. A central aspect of this research is the description of the phenotype of Tumor-Associated Macrophages and the contribution of polarized inflammatory programs to tumor development. The effects of microenvironmental signals, including hypoxia, on immune cell functions is another important aspect of his studies. He has recently identified the p50 NF-kB subunit as a master regulator of M1 versus M2 polarized inflammation and described its significance in diseases associated with polarized inflammatory responses, including allergy, infection and cancer.
Bruno Silva-Santos, Ph.D.
University of Lisbon
Bruno Silva-Santos is Vice-Director of iMM Lisboa, and Associate Professor (with Habilitation) of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon. He did his Ph.D. in Immunology with Mike Owen at Cancer Research UK (The London Research Institute), and trained as a post-doc with Adrian Hayday at King’s College London. Since establishing his independent group at iMM Lisboa, Bruno Silva-Santos has been funded by Starting and Consolidator Grants from the European Research Council (ERC) and by the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). His research is dedicated mostly to gamma-delta T lymphocytes, having dissected novel molecular mechanisms of effector cell differentiation and tumor cell recognition and targeting. His translational work led to a start-up company focused on cancer immunotherapy – Lymphact – where he heads the Scientific Council. He serves as editor for various peer-reviewed journals, including OncoImmunology, Frontiers in Immunology and Oncology, and European Journal of Immunology.
Mark Smyth, Ph.D.
Peter MacCallum Cancer Center
Dr. Mark Smyth is the Head of the Cancer Immunology Program at Peter MacCallum Cancer Center, Victoria, Australia. Dr. Smyth received his Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Melbourne and spent his postdoctoral years from 1989 to 1991 studying lymphocyte-mediated cytotoxicity at the National Cancer Institute, Frederick, MD, USA. In 1991 he returned to the Austin Research Institute in Melbourne and began to study the biological relevance of lymphocyte effector proteins and cytokines in immune control of various cancers. Current research focuses include the role of immunity in the tumor microenvironment and immunosuppressive pathways that prevent tumor regression. His work on innate immune surveillance of cancer received the 2002 William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology and the 2007 Brupbacher Foundation Prize.
Jean-Charles Soria, M.D., Ph.D.
Gustave Roussy Cancer Center
Jean-Charles Soria is a Professor of Medicine and Medical Oncology at South-Paris University. He is a tenure-track and full-time cancer specialist at Institut Gustave Roussy. Dr Soria trained as a medical oncologist and obtained the Silver medal from Paris Medical School in 1997. He gained a PhD degree in the fundamental basis of oncogenesis in 2001, and completed his training with a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Thoracic Head and Neck Medical Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, USA, where he has held an Adjunct Professorship since 2012. Professor Soria is currently Chair of the Drug Development Department at the Gustave Roussy Cancer Center in Paris and is a member of the lung cancer unit with a focus on targeted therapies. He is the Director of the SIRIC program at Gustave Roussy. His main research interests are: early clinical development, phase I trials across solid tumors, pharmacodynamic biomarkers, lung cancer and personalized medecine. He is also involved in translational research aspects related to precision medicine and tumor progression notably in lung cancer models (INSERM unit 981). Dr Soria was a member of ESMO Executive Committee from 2008 to 2009, and has served as an ASCO committee member from 2006 to 2012. He was the scientific chairman of the ECCO-ESMO 2011 meeting that was held in Stockholm in 2011, and chair of the EORTC-NCI-AACR meeting in Barcelona in 2014, as well as in Berlin in 2016. He was the President of the TAT meeting in 2013, 2015 and 2017 in Paris.
Hergen Spitz, M.D., Ph.D.
University of Amsterdam
Dr. Hergen Spits graduated in 1984 from the University of Amsterdam. After a two-year post-doctoral period at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI), he joined Schering Plough (SP) in 1985. He was as a Senior Scientist at the SP research laboratory in Dardilly France and, from 1988 through 1992, at the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto CA. In 1993 he returned to the NKI to assume the position of senior scientist in the division of Immunology. From June 2000 till October 2002 he was head of this division. In October 2002 he became Professor of Cell Biology at the Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam. In 2004 Dr Spits co-founded AIMM therapeutics to commercialize a technology of immortalizing human B cells. In 2006 Spits joined Genentech Inc. in South San Francisco, CA, USA. From 2006 till 2008 Dr Spits was responsible for the drugs discovery efforts in the autoimmune disease program of Genentech. In 2008 he became head of the Cancer Immunotherapy Program. In July 2009 Spits returned to Amsterdam.
Pramod K. Srivastava, M.D., Ph.D.
University of Connecticut
Pramod K Srivastava is the Director of the Carole and Ray Neag Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. He is the incumbent of the Eversource Energy Chair in Experimental Oncology. His research is focused on identification of cancer neoepitopes and application of this knowledge to human cancer immunotherapy.
John Stagg, Ph.D.
University of Montreal
John Stagg is assistant professor at the Faculty of Pharmacy of University of Montreal and principal scientist at the CHUM research center. He completed his Ph.D. in 2005 at McGill University, before joining the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (Australia) for a post-doctoral fellow in immuno-oncology with Prof. Mark J. Smyth. John Stagg is well known for his work on the role of CD73 and adenosine receptors in cancer immunity. He also made important contributions in describing the adaptive immune mechanism-of-action of HER2-targeted therapy and TRAIL receptor agonists. John Stagg’s interest include the identification of novel targets in immuno-oncology and translational investigation of cancer immunotherapies. John Stagg currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Cancer Research and European Journal of Cancer.
Ralph Steinman, Ph.D.
Rockefeller University
Dr. Ralph Steinman was the director of the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology at Rockefeller University and a senior physician at the Rockefeller University Hospital, NY, USA. He received his undergraduate degree from McGill University in 1963 and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1968. He joined the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology at Rockefeller in 1970 as a postdoctoral fellow and continued to be appointed to prominent positions throughout his years there. Most recently he was appointed director of the Christopher H. Browne Center for Immunology and Immune Diseases. He is well known for co-discovering dendritic cells, a previously unknown class of immune cells, during his work with Zanvil A. Cohn in 1973. He was the recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine in 2010, the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research in 2009 and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 2007. Ralph Steinman deceased September 30th 2011.
Tadatsugu Taniguchi, Ph.D.
Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo
Website / tada(a)m.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Dr. Tadasugu Taniguchi is a professor and chair of the Immunology Laboratory at the Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Japan. Prior to joining the medical faculty in 1995 he was a professor at the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology at Osaka University, and held multiple positions with the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research in Tokyo. Dr. Taniguchi has performed groundbreaking research in the field of molecular immunology, including being the first to isolate and characterize an interferon gene. He has also characterized interleukin-2, the key regulator of immune responses. He has been the recipient of many major honors, including the Hammer Prize, Behring-Kitasato Prize, and the Robert Koch Prize. Currently his lab seeks to clarify and understand the molecular mechanisms underlying the regulation of innate immune responses, the role of the IRF family transcription factors in immunity and oncogenesis, mechanisms of cooperation between the innate and adaptive immune responses, interaction of commensal bacteria and host intestinal immune cells, and development of new therapeutic treatment drugs.
Eric Tartour, M.D. Ph.D.
Hôpital Européen Georges Pompidou
Eric Tartour is MD, PhD and Professor of Immunology at the Faculty of Medicine Paris Descartes. He is currently responsible of the laboratory of clinical immunology at HEGP belonging to the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris. Within this laboratory, an immunomonitoring vaccine platform for the follow up of immunotherapy (checkpoint inhibitor blockade and cancer vaccine) has been set up. Eric Tartour is also leading an INSERM team which aims to develop new immunotherapeutic strategies to boost the immune system of cancer patients. His current topic related to the role of local immunity in the control of tumor and the search of biomarker from the tumor microenvironment to predict clinical response to immunotherapy. He made several pioneer scientific observations in the tumor-immunology field : i) In collaboration with Ludger Johannes, he provides the proof of concept in preclinical model of the value to target antigen to dendritic cells to enhance specific CD8+T cells ii) He demonstrated the pro-and anti-tumor immunity of the cytokine interleukin-17. This ambivalent activity of this cytokine has been generalized to most other cytokines. iii) He firstly showed that TH1 cytokine in the tumor microenvironment may be associated with a good prognosis. iv) He and his team also recently provide arguments about the need to induce local mucosal tumor immunity to control mucosal tumors.
Suzanne Topalian, M.D.
Johns Hopkins
Alain Trautman
Cochin Institute
Alain Trautmann is a team leader for the Lymphocyte Activation and Immunological Synapse team within the Immunology and Hematology Department at the Cochin Institute, Paris, France. His team is studying the cell-cell communication in the immune system, particularly events that take place at the interface between two cells of this system, when they form conjugates. They are also studying the structure and the functioning of the immunological synapse, particularly the one formed between T cells and dendritic cells.
Giorgio Trinchieri, M.D.
National Cancer Institute
Giorgio Trinchieri is the Director of the Cancer and Inflammation Program and Chief of the Laboratory of Experimental Immunology, National Cancer Institute, Frederick, MD, USA. His research interests currently include the role of inflammation, innate resistance, and immunity in carcinogenesis, cancer progression, and prevention or destruction. Dr. Trinchieri received his M.D. degree from the University of Torino, Italy in 1973 and was at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, USA from 1979 to 1999. While at the Wistar Institute his group discovered Interleukin-12, and he spent many years characterizing mechanisms of its production and the role it has on tumor immunity, infections, and autoimmunity. Trinchieri was also the Director of the Schering Plough Laboratory for Immunological Research in Dardilly, France, and an NIH Fogarty Scholar at the Laboratory for Parasitic Diseases, NIAID.
Axel Ullrich, Ph.D.
Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry
Dr. Axel Ullrich is currently the director of the Department of Molecular Biology at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Martinsried, Germany. He also holds multiple positions at the Singapore Oncogenome (SOG) Project, within both the Center for Molecular Medicine (CMM) and the Institute of Medical Biology (IMB), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star), Singapore. He earned his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany in 1975 and completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, USA. Dr. Ullrich has been a leader in gene-technology and his discoveries have caused the development of many therapeutic drug. One of these was Humulin, the first therapeutic agent to be developed through gene-based technology as well as the first biotechnology product ever. His department primarily focuses on signal transduction mechanisms and their significance in normal biological processes and pathophysiological phenomena such as cancer. Recent achievements include being honored with the Wolf Foundation Prize in 2010.
Pablo Umana, Ph.D.
Roche Glycart AG
Website / pablo.umana(a)roche.com
Danila Valmori, Ph.D.
Nantes Cancer Center, Nantes, France
Dr. Danila Valmori is an investigator at the Cancer Vaccine Collaborative and director of the Cancer Vaccine Program at the Nantes Cancer Center. She has been published in academic journals such as The Journal of Clinical Investigation, The Journal of Immunology, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
Pierre van der Bruggen, Ph.D.
Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Brussels, Belgium
Pierre Van der Bruggen is a leading researcher at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR), Brussels, Belgium. Under his guidance the Regulation of T Lymphocyte Function in Tumors research group identified the first gene coding for a human tumor antigen recognized by cytolytic T lymphocytes (CTL). Using this information it was possible to define antigenic peptides encoded by genes and these peptides have been important in therapeutic vaccination trials of cancer patients. Current research topics include the interactions between tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and tumor cells, and the mechanism causing anergy of CD8 and CD4 T lymphocytes due to the presence of galectin-3. He has been published in academic journals such as "Immunity", "Science", "Cancer Research", "Journal of Experimental Medicine", and "The Journal of Immunology".
Peter Vandenabeele, Ph.D.
Ghent University
Prof. Vandenabeele’s research group is based at the VIB Department for Molecular Biomedical Research at Ghent University. Peter did his Ph.D. at Ghent University in the group of Prof. Walter Fiers. He then became PI at the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB). His research activities focus on molecular mechanisms of cell death modalities (a.o. apoptosis, necroptosis) and the role herein of caspases and RIPK. These phenomena are studied in an integrated way at the level of biochemistry, cell biology and in various inflammatory diseases models. The work of Peter Vandenabeele and his collaborators has been published in more than 318 articles (excluding abstracts), 23 book chapters and he edited two books. The articles have been cited 28500 times, with an h index of 90, according to Web of Science. Peter Vandenabeele has been director of the Bachelor and Master program in Biochemistry and Biotechnology in the Faculty of Sciences at the Ghent University (2004-2012). He has been Member of the Board of Directors of the Ghent University (2012-2014) and of the Ghent College University (2007-2013). He received twice the prestigious Methusalem grant from the Flemish Government (2009-2015; 2016-2022). He has been elected as member of the Flemish Royal Academy of Belgium in Sciences and Arts (Brussels, 2012), received the career award from European Academy of Tumor Immunology (EATI) (Paris, 2013), received the Francqui chair at the Antwerp University (2013), and the prestigious 5 yearly FWO Excellence Prize for Fundamental Biomedical Research (2015).
Benoît J. Van den Eynde, M.D., Ph.D.
Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research
Dr. Benoit Van den Eynde is currently the Director of Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR), Brussels Branch, Belgium and a Group Leader for the Tumor Immunology and Antigen Processing group. He earned his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University College of London (UCL) and is a full member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium and the Academy of Cancer Immunology. Awards he has received during his career include the Prize of the 165th Anniversary of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium in 2001, the Francqui Chair at the Université libre de Bruxelles in 2005 and the 2007 GlaxoSmithKline prize. Van den Eynde was one of the investigators involved in the first identification of cancer antigens recognized by T lymphocytes on mouse and human tumors. He has gained strong international recognition for his research in antigen processing and tumor immunology. Recent remarkable discoveries include that of a new mode of antigenic peptide processing and a mechanism that suppresses immunity to tumors, which may hamper the effect of current immunotherapies.
Andrea Velardi, M.D.
University of Perugia
Andrea Velardi works in the Hematology and Clinical Immunology Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine at the University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy. He received his M.D. in Medicine from the University of Perugia in 1975. After graduating he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA and at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2003 he received the Annual Prize for Excellence in Translational Research from the American-Italian Cancer Foundation. He has been published in academic journals such as Current Stem Cell Research & Therapy, Trends in Immunology, and Science.
Éric Vivier, DVM, Ph.D., PU-PH
Centre d'Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML)
Éric Vivier, DVM, PhD, is Professor of Immunology at Aix-Marseille University and at the Public Hospital of Marseille. He was recently appointed Scientific Director of Innate Pharma, a biotechnology company dedicated to improving cancer treatment with innovative therapeutic antibodies that exploit the immune system. Eric Vivier is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Maisons-Alfort and received his PhD in Immunology from the University of Paris XI. He completed his post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School, then joined Aix-Marseille University as professor at the Centre d'Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML) in 1993 before becoming its director from 2008 to the end of December 2017. He is also one of the founders of Marseille-Immunopôle, an immunology cluster created in 2014 linking fundamental and therapeutic research, innovation and industrial development in the Aix-Marseille region. Eric Vivier's work focuses on the functioning of Natural killer lymphocytes (NK) and other innate lymphoid cells (ILCs). He has published nearly 300 scientific articles and is on the list of the most cited researchers (https://clarivate.com/hcr). A laureate of the European Research Council (ERC advanced grants), a member of the Académie Nationale de Médecine and the Institut Universitaire de France, Prof. Vivier has received several awards including those from the Ligue Nationale contre le Cancer (1996, 2004 and 2013) and the European Federation of Immunological Societies (EFIS, 2004).
Erwin Wagner, Ph.D.
Spanish National Cancer Research Center
Dr. Erwin Wagner is the Vice Director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) and the Director of the BBV Foundation- CNIO Cancer Cell Biology Program. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1978 from the Biochemistry Department of the Technical University of Graz, Austria for studies on the regulation of gene expression during bacterial T1 infection. From 1979 to 1983 he was a Max-Kade Fellow and Research Associate at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia where he worked with Beatrice Mintz on gene transfer and gene control in mouse development. He was a group leader at the EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany from 1983 to 1988 and then joined the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria in 1988 as a Senior Scientist and Founding Member. While working at the IMP his research focused on gene functions in mammalian development and oncogenesis. He was appointed Deputy Director of the IMP from 1997 to 2008 and his lab moved to CNIO in 2008. The research interests of the Genes, Development and Disease Group, which Wagner leads, include using mouse models to explore the functions of the AP-1 (Fos/Jun) transcription factor complex in regulating cell proliferation, differentiation and cell death. The group is also working to develop characterize mouse models for human diseases that can be used for preclinical studies.
Hermann Wagner, M.D., Ph.D.
Technical University of Munich, Marburg, Germany
Dr. Hermann Wagner is the former head of the Medical Faculty of the Technical University Munich (TUM), Germany. He received his M.D. in 1967 from the University of Tubingen, Germany and in 1973 received his Ph.D. in Human Biology from Melbourne University, Australia. After graduating he worked with Paul Klein at the Institute of Microbiology at Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz/Germany from 1973-1983. He also spent time as a university lecturer and a full professor for the Institute of Microbiology at the University of Ulm. In 1989 he returned to the Technical University of Munich and ultimately became the head of the Institute of Medical Microbiology, Immunology and Hygiene. Wagners research activities focused on mechanisms of protective immunity towards pathogens. He has contributed to our understanding of TLR and was one of the first to realize that bacterial/viral DNA activated Innate Immune cells via TLR9. Additional discoveries include being able to show that TLR7 and/or TLR8 recognized pathogen derived RNA.
Jeffrey S. Weber, M.D., Ph.D
Moffitt Cancer Center
Bob Weinberg, M.D., Ph.D.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dr. Bob Weinberg is the director of the Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology at MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA and a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He studied Biology at MIT, receiving his B.S. in 1964, M.D. in 1965, and Ph.D. in 1969. Upon graduation, he spent time as a research fellow at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth, Israel and held a fellowship at the Salk Institute in LaJolla, California, USA. He returned to MIT as a research associate in 1972 and has been working on cancer research there ever since. His labs current work focuses on the interactions between epithelial and stromal cells that produce carcinomas and the processes by which cancer cells invade and metastasize. Past achievements include: identifying and characterizing both the first oncogene and the first tumor suppressor gene, and demonstrating how certain gene regulators contribute to cancer metastasis.
Irving L. Weissman, M.D.
Stanford University School of Medicine
Irving L. Weissman is the director of the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, CA, USA. He graduated from Montana State College, Bozeman, MT, USA with a B.S. in Pre-Medical in 1961, followed in 1965 by a M.D. in Medicine from Stanford University. He is well known for his 1988 discovery of a method to isolate hematopoietic cells in mice, which made him the first to isolate in pure form any stem cell in any species. Since then he has gone on to isolate many types of stem cells. His current research encompasses the phylogeny and developmental biology of the cells that make up the blood-forming and immune systems. Recent publications include research on a new ways to transplant new blood-forming stem cells into the bone marrow of mice, without the radiation and chemotherapy usually required, in order to effectively replace their immune systems. The benefits of this could be huge for people with autoimmune diseases. In addition to being the director, Weissman is also the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor for Clinical Investigation in Cancer Research, a professor of pathology and developmental biology, and professor of neurosurgery and of biological sciences.
Otmar Wiestler, M.D., Ph.D.
German Cancer Research Center
Dr. Otmar D. Wiestler is chairman of the Management Board and Scientific Director of the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (German Cancer Research Center) in Heidelberg, Germany. He studied Medicine at the University of Freiburg and received his M.D. in 1984. From 1984 to 1987 he conducted postdoctoral research within the Department of Pathology, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA. In 1987 he completed his residency training in Neuropathology at the Institute of Neuropathology, Department of Pathology, University of Zurich, Switzerland. From 1992 to 2003 he headed the Department of Neuropathology at the University of Bonn where he was also the head of the German Brain Tumor Reference Center, coordinator of the Collaborative Research Center for Clinical & Molecular Neurobiology, and chairman of the BONFOR research committee. He was awarded the German Cancer Award (Deutscher Krebspreis) in 2004 and the Bundesverdienstkreuz in 2005. Fields of interest include: Molecular Genetics and Molecular Neuropathology of Human Brain Tumors; Clinical Neuropathology of CNS Tumors; Gene Transfer into the CNS; Molecular Neuropathology and Pathogenesis of Focal Human Epilepsies; Neural Stem Cells and Reconstructive Neurobioloy; Molecular Genetics and Molecular Pathology of Sporadic and Hereditary Breast Cancer.
Karen Willard-Gallo, Ph.D.
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Isaac P. Witz, M.D., Ph.D.
Tel Aviv University
Dr. Isaac P. Witz received his PhD degree from Hebrew University, Jerusalem and post-doctoral training at Roswell Park Memorial Institute, Buffalo, NY. Witz established a research laboratory at Tel Aviv University and was promoted to full professorship. Since 2003 he is Professor Emeritus and heads the Laboratory of Tumor Microenvironment & Metastasis Research, The Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University. The scientific occupation & interests of Isaac Witz are: The immune microenvironment of tumors; The functional impact on tumor progression of the crosstalk between cancer and non-cancerous cells in the tumor microenvironment; metastasis and the metastatic microenvironment. The present focus of his lab is on the functional and theranostic implications of the interactions between brain-metastasizing melanoma and brain cells with respect to the formation of brain metastasis.
Jedd D. Wolchok, M.D., Ph.D.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Jedd Wolchok received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and both M.D and Ph.D. from New York University, where he also fulfilled his residency program. He completed his fellowship at MSKCC and remained on faculty with an appointment in the Melanoma/Sarcoma Service. Dr. Wolchok is the Lloyd J. Old and Daniel K. Ludwig Chair in Clinical Investigation, Chief of the Melanoma and Immunotherapeutics Service, Attending Physician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) with an expertise in the treatment of metastatic melanoma. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and both M.D and Ph.D. from New York University, where he also fulfilled his residency program. He completed his fellowship at MSKCC and remained on faculty with an appointment in the Melanoma and Immunotherapeutics Service, which he now leads. Dr. Wolchok has helped establish MSKCC as a leader in the discovery and treatment of cancers with novel immunotherapies. Dr. Wolchok was instrumental in the clinical development leading to the approval of ipilimumab for advanced melanoma and recently designed and led a global phase 3 trial of combined checkpoint blockade for melanoma. He has been at the forefront of cancer immunotherapy, as an active clinician scientist exploring innovative immunotherapeutic strategies in laboratory models and as a principal investigator in numerous pivotal clinical trials. In 2011, he established the Immunotherapeutics Clinical Core, a specialized phase 1 outpatient unit at MSKCC that is focused on the conduct of novel immunotherapy trials, with a specific emphasis on pharmacodynamic biomarker identification. This group treats patients with a broad spectrum of malignancies and has become a model for similar efforts by other major cancer centers throughout the world.
Rolf Zinkernagel, M.D., Ph.D.
University of Zurich
Dr. Rolf M. Zinkernagel is a professor and Head of the Institute of Experimental Immunology, Department of Pathology at the University of Zurich, Switzerland where he specializes in infectious diseases and immunopathology as well as self-nonself discrimination in immunology. He received his M.D. degree from the University of Basel in 1970 and his Ph.D. degree in Microbiology from the Australian National University in 1975. Research conducted alongside Dr. Robert Doherty led to him winning the Lasker Award in 1995 for the discovery of MHC restriction of T-cell recognition and the altered-self hypothesis and receiving the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1996 for discoveries concerning the specificity of the cell mediated immune deference. He currently holds numerous professional memberships as well as editorial board positions for scientific journals.
Laurence Zitvogel, M.D., Ph.D.
Gustave Roussy Cancer Center
Dr. Laurence Zitvogel is a Research Director at the Institut National de la Santé et Recherche Médicale in a laboratory located at Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France. She graduated in 1992 with a degree in Medical Oncology from the School of Medicine of the University of Paris, France. She began her scientific career at the University of Pittsburgh, USA working with Michael Lotze. Her expertise is mainly dendritic cell and innate effector biology and relevance during tumor development, as well as exosome-based vaccine designs.