iCAN science seminar on May 23 with Prof. Catherine Wu

You are warmly welcome to iCAN science seminar on 

Thu 23.5.2024 at 13:30-14:30, Biomedicum 1, Seminar room 3 and online. 

Speaker: Prof. Catherine J. Wu, MD, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston

Title: Personalized Cancer Vaccines: Driving T cells into tumor

Catherine J. Wu, MD is a Professor of Medicine and Chief, Division of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies and the Lavine Family Chair for Preventative Care Therapies at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the Association of American Physicians. She received her M.D. from Stanford University School of Medicine and completed her clinical training in Internal Medicine and Hematology-Oncology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA. She joined the staff at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2000.

Prof. Wu’s research program at DFCI has consistently focused on addressing a fundamental feature of cancer: its genomic heterogeneity—providing a means to evolve, adapt and escape from immune control. At the same time, she has studied the adaptive immune system, which is inherently engineered to be exquisitely responsive to environmental challenges, possessing fundamental ‘search and destroy’ functions and the capacity to provide long-term protective immunologic memory, of cancer patients. Her central focus has been thus to understand the molecular basis of tumor-host coevolution, both with natural cancer progression and with therapeutic perturbation. These have been primarily genomics- based studies to systematically analyze model systems and human specimens, conducted most extensively in blood malignancies such as chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), but also diverse other solid tumor cancers. Her group pioneered proof-of-concept studies of genomics-guided individualized cancer vaccines that target personal cancer neoantigens. She has led early phase clinical trials to test personalized tumor vaccines in melanoma and glioblastoma. As co-leader of the Center for Personalized Cancer Vaccines at DFCI, she oversees a portfolio of clinical trials of melanoma, glioblastoma, renal cell carcinoma, ovarian cancer, CLL and follicular lymphoma.

Link for those joining on Zoom

https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/64804986682?pwd=ME8rOVhucnQ5YXE1VVdpck5BN25BZz09

Meeting ID: 648 0498 6682 Passcode: 366409

Coffee will be served before the seminar.

For more information, please contact ican@helsinki.fi