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2019 Featured Talks » Panel Discussion: Immuno Oncology

Panel Discussion: Immuno Oncology

Sandip Patel, MD
Associate Professor, Medical Oncology/Hematology
UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center

Dr. Sandip Patel, MD is an Associate Professor at UCSD and a medical oncologist focused on early development of novel immunotherapy, in particular early phase clinical trials of cancer immunotherapy and thoracic oncology immunotherapy trials. His research focus is on predictive biomarkers for immunotherapeutic response and generation of personalized cancer immunotherapy regimens.

He is co-leader for the Experimental Therapeutics (Phase 1) Program and Deputy Director for the Center for Precision Immunotherapy at UCSD. He is Assistant Director of the Clinical Trials Office at UCSD Moores Cancer Center and a member of the Cancer Immunotherapy, Experimental Therapeutics (Phase 1), and Thoracic Oncology Programs.

Dr. Patel earned his medical degree at Baylor College of Medicine, while performing research at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He completed a residency in Internal Medicine at UCLA Medical Center. He completed a fellowship in Medical Oncology and Hematology at Duke University Medical Center. He is triple board-certified in internal medicine, medical oncology, and hematology and was named a “Top Doc” in the most recent San Diego Magazine Physicians of Exceptional Excellence survey.

Eric Ostertag, MD, PhD
CEO
Poseida Therapeutics

Dr. Eric Ostertag is currently the Chief Executive Officer of Poseida Therapeutics, a clinical-stage company using proprietary non-viral gene engineering technologies to create CAR-T and other therapies in pursuit of a potential cure for a number of cancers, including multiple myeloma. Before starting Poseida, he founded and served as the Chief Executive Officer and President of Transposagen Biopharmaceuticals, Inc., a gene editing technology company focused on research reagents, and from which Poseida was spun out in 2015. Dr. Ostertag received both his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and his B.S. in Genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Shabnam Shalapour, PhD
Associate Professor of Pharmacology
UC San Diego

Dr. Shalapour is an assistant adjunct professor at UCSD Department of Pharmacology. She started her research career with a Diploma degree in Biochemistry from the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Duesseldorf (Germany). After completing her Diploma thesis, she shifted her focus to cancer research with an emphasis in immunology. She received her PhD under the supervision of Dr. Blankenstein, a leading cancer immunologist at the Institute of Immunology, in a collaboration with Dr. Henze, a clinician in the field of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) treatments (ALL-BFM trial) at the Department of Pediatric Oncology/Hematology at the Charité-Medical University of Berlin. Her PhD thesis involved experiments studying the relationship between bone marrow (BM) stroma cells and acute lymphoblastic leukemia cells. Thereafter, she decided to continue her focus on tumor immunity and inflammation. She was awarded the German Research Foundation fellowship, and in August 2012, she joined the laboratory of Dr. Michael Karin at UCSD to study inflammation and cancer.

Her scientific focus is to understand the basic mechanisms of how chronic inflammation regulates the adaptive immune response to cancer. She has recently found that chronic liver inflammation promoted accumulation of liver resident IgA+ plasma cells with potent immunosuppressive properties (Shalapour et al., Nature, 2017). These cells, termed ISP, promote tumor growth and resistance to therapy by inhibiting activation of cancer-directed cytotoxic T cells (CTL). First identified in prostate cancer, ISP accumulate in response to androgen ablation or oxaliplatin treatment and prevent CTL-mediated tumor regression (Shalapour et al., Nature, 2015). For her work, she has been awarded with the CRI-Irvington and Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investigators Award.

Travis Young, PhD
VP, Biologics
Director, Calibr at Scripps Research

Dr. Young is the Vice President of Biologics at Calibr, a division of Scripps Research. He received a BS in biochemistry from Boston College and a PhD in chemical biology from The Scripps Research Institute as an ARCS scholar. At Scripps, his work focused on the development of unnatural amino acid incorporation methodologies to improve the properties of therapeutic proteins. This work was foundational for the development of programs in the Calibr pipeline today, including a bispecific antibody for prostate cancer which will enter clinical trials next year. After receiving his PhD, he completed a postdoc at Harvard Medical School with an NIH fellowship, in the department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology with Dr. Christopher T Walsh.

Dr. Young was a member of the founding group of principal investigators at Calibr and serves as the lead investigator on multiple bench-to-bedside antibody and cellular therapy-based programs. Dr. Young maintains a research group focused in the development of novel therapeutics at the interface between protein engineering and synthetic biology. This research spans multiple disease indications including cancer, autoimmune, metabolic disorders, and infectious disease. His work has been highly awarded and received support from the Wellcome Trust, NIH (National Cancer Institute), Department of Defense, Mesothelioma Research foundation, American Cancer Society, among others. His work has resulted in numerous publications and patents with >1500 citations in the past 5 years. Dr. Young’s lead program, a switchable CAR-T cell platform, was recently partnered with AbbVie. This broad relationship enables his team to lead the first in human clinical study for the switchable CAR-T cell platform while studying the potential to expand CAR-T cell impact into solid tumors.