Claudia Gravekamp
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, USA
Biography
Claudia Gravekamp, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and a member of the Albert Einstein Cancer Center. She received her PhD in 1988 in the field of Tumor Immunology at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. From 1987-1993, she served as head of the Laboratory for Leptospirosis at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In 1993, she started as a Research Fellow in Medicine at the Channing Laboratory of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, and soon thereafter became an Instructor in Medicine until 1998. There, she developed vaccines against Group B Streptococcus and gained expertise in the design and development of gene-driven vaccines. From 1998 to 2006, she was an Associate Member in the Institute for Drug Development of the Cancer Therapy and Research Center and an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center, in San Antonio, TX. In San Antonio she began to develop a program aimed at genetic vaccines for breast cancer. From 2006-2008, she was a Scientist at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute in San Francisco, CA, continuing to develop novel immunotherapeutic approaches to cancer utilizing an attenuated bacterium Listeria monocytogenes as selective delivery platform for anti-cancer agents, and study their efficacy in preclinical models at young and old age. Some of these approaches are now coming to fruition in her current laboratory at Einstein and begin to move towards clinical trials. Her laboratory was the first showing that live attenuated Listeria could be used to deliver therapeutic levels of radioactivity selectively to the metastases and tumors in mice with cancer. She has been funded by grants from the NIH (RO1, R21, RO3), other grant agencies and private industry since 1999), published 65 scientific articles, is ad-hoc reviewer for various scientific journals (Nature, Cancer Immunology Immunotherapy, Science Translational Medicine, Cancer Research, Clinical Cancer Research, Cellular Immunology, J Immunol, Transplantation Infectious Disease, Biogerontology, Experimental Gerontology). She is reviewer on multiple NIH study sections.
Abstract
Abstract : Live attenuated Listeria as new delivery platform for anticancer agents