Michele Teng
A/Prof Michele Teng holds an NHMRC CDF and is head of the Cancer Immunoregulation and Immunotherapy laboratory at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Brisbane, Australia. She obtained her PhD in 2006 at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and University of Melbourne, Australia where she investigated strategies to improve the efficacy of CAR-T cells for cancer immunotherapy. Over her career, she has published 97 peer-reviewed primary papers and reviews (8264 citations, Google Scholar; H-index, 47) in high impact journals such as Cancer Discovery, Nat Med, NRCO. Her laboratory investigates how tumour-induced immunosuppression impedes the effective treatment of established cancer. Specifically, in cancer initiation, growth and metastasis she is interested in; the role of Treg and other immunoregulatory T cell subsets, the adenosinergic pathway, and the IL-23-associated cytokine family. Her group provided the game changing pre-clinical proof that neoadjuvant immunotherapy was superior to adjuvant immunotherapy in the context of surgery. She has now explored the immunological mechanism of action of this cancer treatment breakthrough, including the definition of new peripheral blood biomarkers. Her ongoing collaborations with leading immuno-oncologists allows the value of these pre-clinical discoveries to be fully exploited and validated in current clinical trials of neoadjuvant immunotherapies.
Abstracts this author is presenting: