Date: Friday, 7 June 2024

Time: 11.00AM – 12.00PM

Venue: IMCB Seminar Room 03-46, Level 3 Proteos, Biopolis, Singapore 138673 (Physical)

Speaker: Dr. Jennifer Grandis, UCSF

Host: Prof. Hong Wanjin, IMCB

 

 

 

Head and neck cancer most frequently arises in the setting of chronic tobacco use and/or prior human papillomavirus (HPV) infection. Treatment options have remained relatively unchanged for decades with surgery, platinum chemotherapy and radiation offered in most cases. FDA approval of immune checkpoint inhibitors in 2016 underscored the importance of the immune system in this malignancy. Genomic analysis of head and neck tumors revealed few dominant oncogenes and precision therapy has remained elusive. Clinical trials supported by strong preclinical evidence and bidirectional translation offers hope for more effective therapies.

 

Dr. Jennifer R. Grandis is a physician scientist who is interested in the impact of gender on career development in medicine and science. Her cancer research is focused on elucidating and targeting key signaling pathways and genomic alterations in head and neck cancer with the goals of enabling precision medicine studies. She has leveraged her access to head and neck cancer patients and their biospecimens to optimize translational research studies that include developing novel therapies in the laboratory for clinical application as well as generating and interrogating relevant preclinical models to determine the underlying mechanism of clinical findings.  In her institutional roles at the University of Pittsburgh and since 2015, at UCSF, she has facilitated collaborations between clinicians and investigators with an emphasis of developing a robust research infrastructure to support clinical and translational cancer studies. She has published over 400 papers in the peer-reviewed literature and been continuously funded by the NIH since joining the faculty in 1993. Dr. Grandis is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation the Association of American Physicians and the National Academy of Medicine. She is an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor.