About – Management

Amorette Barber, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Biology at Longwood University in Virginia. Dr. Barber received her Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology from Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. She then went on to complete a post-doctoral fellowship in immunology at Dartmouth Medical School. In 2011, Dr. Barber began her independent research career at Longwood University and she has published more than 25 articles and is the inventor on one international patent. Dr. Barber is an expert in chimeric-antigen receptor T cell therapies. Her recent research has focused on the development of a chimeric- antigen receptor that targets PD-1 ligands on tumor cells and on the role various costimulatory receptors play in CAR T cell function and efficacy.

Dr. Sandeep Dhanda has authored 50 scientific publications. Since joining Saint Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Jan 2020, Dr. Dhanda has published 3 new publications. His work has been referred as relevant existing scientific publications in 12 patents filed by renowned organizations like Moderna, Inserm and Hummingbird (1). 

Dr. Dhanda completed his post-doctoral training at La Jolla Institute for Immunology, California from 2016 to 2020. His post-doctoral research was the development of tools for the Immune Epitope Database and Analysis Resource (IEDB-AR). These tools are a part of IEDB-AR, which is being used by +5,000 unique academic users every month, worldwide with no licensing fee and licensed to +20 well-known biopharma industries to predict epitopes for vaccine and immunotherapy candidates (2). 

Learn More 
La Jolla Institute of Immunology: 
https://www.lji.org 

Saint Jude Children’s Research Hospital:   
https://www.stjude.org

Sources 
(1)   https://www.lens.org/lens/search/patent/analysis?scholarQueryId=c7b46e50-127a-45e6-bfb7-29c3efa3d0eb 
(2)   https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/47/W1/W502/5494780).

Luca Gattinoni, M.D. holds the Chair for Functional Immune Cell Modulation at the University of Regensburg, Germany. He is currently the Director of the Division of Functional Immune Cell Modulation at the Regensburg Center for Interventional Immunology (RCI). Dr. Gattinoni graduated from the University of Milan School of Medicine with distinction in 1998 and completed his residency in Medical Oncology at the National Cancer Institute of Milan (INT) in 2003. He received postdoctoral training in Cellular Immunotherapy and Tumor Immunology with Dr. Restifo at the Surgery Branch of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI, NIH) from 2003-2008. He remained at the NCI until 2019 as Staff Scientist (2008-2013) and NIH Stadtman Investigator (2013-2019). His research focuses on the development of T cell-based immunotherapies for patients with advanced cancer. Dr. Gattinoni’s contributions to the field include the identification of human stem cell memory T cells (T_SCM) and their use in clinical trials of adoptive immunotherapy. More recently, together with his research team, he has identified several transcription factors, epigenetic regulators, microRNAs, and metabolic checkpoints governing T cell stemness and T_SCM formation that can be harnessed to potentiate T cell-based immunotherapies. Dr. Gattinoni has published more than 100 manuscripts and is the recipient of several prizes and honors including the 2004 SITC Presidential Award, the 2012 Wilson S. Stone Memorial Award, and the 2013 NCI Director’s Intramural Innovation Award.

Professor De Maria is an internationally renowned researcher and oncologist and professor of General Pathology at the Faculty of Medicine of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Rome. He previously held senior positions at major scientific institutions such as Head of the Department of Hematology, Oncology and Molecular Medicine of the National Institute of Health and Scientific Director of the National Cancer Institute “Regina Elena” in Rome. He is currently Chairman of Alliance Against Cancer, a network that brings together the most important cancer centres in Italy.

Professor De Maria has an extensive experience in oncology research gained in Italy and abroad and has directed research teams and conducted several studies supported by national and international funding. Among his most important research we include those aimed at explaining the mechanisms underlying the production of blood cells and the property of cancer cells to resist to drugs. He also conducted pioneering studies on the identification of cancer stem cells of colon and lung cancers, he discovered the capacity of glioblastoma stem cells to create tumor vessels, and identified key mechanisms underlying the formation of metastases in breast and colon tumors.

Martin J D Souza has obtained his PhD degree from the University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA. He is working as a Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in the College of Pharmacy at Mercer University in Atlanta, Georgia. He also serves as the Director of the Clinical Laboratory and Co-Director of the Center for Drug Delivery Research. He has published over 90 manuscripts and has been the recipient of several research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American Diabetes Association, the Georgia Cancer Coalition and the Georgia Research Alliance. He serves on several Editorial Boards and is a journal Reviewer for over 10 scientific journals and has several patents issued in the area of Nanotechnology.

Franco Locatelli is the Head of the Department of Paediatric Haematology and Oncology, IRCCS Bambino Gesù Children’s Hospital, Rome and Full Professor of Pediatrics at the Sapienza, University of Rome, Italy. He leads the largest programme of childhood allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) in Italy and in 2019 was appointed President of the Italian Higher Council of Health, the technical scientific advisory body to the Ministry of Health. He is also serving as coordinator of the Technical-Scientific Committee for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professor Locatelli is an expert in haematological and oncological malignancies of childhood. He has been the President of the Italian Association for Pediatric Hematology-Oncology AIEOP from
2004–2006, and served as chairman of the European EWOG-MDS consortium from 2005 to 2011. Currently, he coordinates the national protocols for children with newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukaemia and relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL). He has implemented in Italy the first-in-human academic studies on children with CD19+ lymphoid malignancies using 2^nd-generation retroviral and lentiviral chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells and on children with neuroblastoma and other solid tumors expressing GD2 molecule using 3^rd-generation retroviral CAR T cells.

Professor Locatelli is also involved in the development and validation of gene therapy and genome editing approaches in patients with thalassaemia and sickle cell disease and he has extensive experience in running Phase I/II clinical trials. He is the author or co-author of more than 1.150 peer-reviewed articles published in international journals and he has an overall impact factor above 7000 and an H-index of 106 (Scopus source).