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SITC elects three new board members
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The Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer has elected three new members to its board of directors who will begin their three-year terms in January 2020.
The newly elected board members include Alessandro Cesano, MD, PhD, chief medical officer of ESSA Pharma; Tanja de Gruijl, PhD, professor of translational tumor immunology and head of the immunotherapy lab at the Cancer Center of Amsterdam University; and Stefani Spranger, PhD, assistant professor in the department of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.
Cesano spent the first 12 years of her career researching tumor immunology at the Wistar Institute. Since then she has held various research and development and executive roles in the private sector, including positions at Amgen, SmithKline Beecham, and NanoString.
de Gruijl has been in the industry for more than 25 years and has done research ranging from preclinical studies to the immune monitoring of phase 1 to 3 clinical trials. Her main research interest lies in the in vivo targeting and modulation of dendritic cells in tumor-draining lymph nodes and the tumor microenvironment.
Spranger’s early work focused on adoptive T-cell transfer and dendritic cell-based vaccines. Her laboratory currently focuses on highlighting the mechanisms to help understand interactions between tumor cells, dendritic cells and T-cell responses.
The newly elected board members will replace three outgoing at-large directors who are serving their final year on the SITC board. The outgoing board members include Charles G. Drake, MD, PhD, as director of genitourinary oncology and associate director for clinical research at Columbia University Medical Center’s Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center; Leisha A. Emens, MD, PhD, professor of medicine in hematology/oncology, co-leader of the Hillman Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy Program, and director of translational immunotherapy for the Women's Cancer Research Center at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center; and Kristen Hege, MD, VP of translational development, hematology/oncology, at Celgene.