Inaugural Hanna Wise Chair in Cancer Research: Robert H. Vonderheide |
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April 29, 2014, Volume 60, No. 32 |
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(left to right) Brian, Marc and Allen Wise, Dr. Robert Vonderheide and his wife, Dr. Susan Domchek, Basser Professor in Oncology |
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Robert H. Vonderheide, the inaugural Hanna Wise Professor in Cancer Research, is a national pioneer in therapeutic cancer vaccines and one of the leaders in Penn Medicine’s world-renowned cancer immunotherapy group. He has also just been named co-leader on the Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C), Lustgarten Foundation and American Association for Cancer pancreatic cancer convergence dream team effort “Transforming Pancreatic Cancer to a Treatable Disease.” The recently announced initiative will support the dream team’s development of new approaches to harness patients’ own immune cells to treat pancreatic cancer.
Dr. Vonderheide serves as investigator at the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute and Associate Cancer Center Director for Translational Research at the Abramson Cancer Center. He has made significant contributions to tghe understanding of how the immune system and tumor cells interact. His specific areas of research focus on tumor antigen discovery, telomerase vaccination, CD40 activation of antigen presenting cells and immunosurveillance of cancer. Overall, his research combines efforts in both basic and clinical investigation to explore immunotherapies for breast cancer, other BRCA1/2-related cancers, melanoma, pancreatic cancer and other malignancies.
The Hanna Wise Professorship was established by Allen Wise, his sons Marc and Brian, and their wives Laurel and Nastaran to honor the life of Hanna Wise and her courageous bout with breast cancer. The professorship also honors Dr. John H. Glick who, said Mr. Wise, “is a model of how medicine should be practiced.” Mr. Wise and his family hope supporting cancer research will lead to improved outcomes from the disease.
“We are fortunate to have Dr. Vonderheide’s leadership and innovative work. He has been crucial in helping the Abramson Cancer Center to rapidly move ideas from the lab to animal models and into clinical trials,” said J. Larry Jameson, Dean of the Perelman School of Medicine and Executive Vice President for the Health System.
Dr. Vonderheide graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed a doctor of philosophy (DPhil) degree in immunology at Oxford University. Dr. Vonderheide subsequently attended Harvard Medical School, completing a residency in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital and a clinical fellowship in hematology-oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He was an instructor in medicine there when he was highly recruited by the University of Pennsylvania in 2001.
Dr. Vonderheide has won numerous awards throughout his career. Most recently, he was the recipient of the Stone Family Award in BRCA Prevention, which provides financial support to faculty conducting innovative BRCA1/2 prevention and vaccine research at the Abramson Cancer Center’s Basser Research Center for BRCA, and the 2013 William Osler Patient Oriented Research Award, granted to a Perelman School faculty member for a body of work emphasizing clinical research performed predominantly at Penn in the last five years.
Dr. Vonderheide has been elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the American Association of Physicians. He is a member of the Immunotherapy Task Force on the NCI’s Investigational Drug Steering Committee; the Scientific Advisory Board of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network; the Clinical Advisory Board of the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer; and a standing member of the NIH’s Cancer Immunopathology and Immunotherapy study section. Dr. Vonderheide is credited with over 100 peer-reviewed publications, with many articles published in high-impact journals such as Blood, Cancer Cell, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Science.
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