Science Commune with Daniel Chen and Teemu Junttila

 
Daniel Chen, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer, IGM Biosciences
Daniel S. Chen, MD, PhD, is the Chief Medical Officer for IGM Biosciences, and former Vice President, Global Head of Cancer Immunotherapy Development at Genentech/Roche. He received a BS degree in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1990), a PhD in Microbiology & Immunology (1996) and MD (1998) from the University of Southern California. Daniel completed an Internal Medicine Residency and Medical Oncology Fellowship at Stanford University (2003). He went on to complete a Post-doctoral fellowship with Mark Davis in Immunology, where he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Associate. He also ran the metastatic melanoma clinic at the Stanford Cancer Center from 2003-2006. In that time, he studied human anti-cancer immune responses pre- and post- cancer vaccination and cytokine administration to determine why anti-tumor immune responses were not more clinically effective. He received a U19 grant to develop better immunologic tools to interrogate human immune responses and ultimately patented the MHC cellular microarray to detect and functionally characterize antigen-specific T cell states. He continued as Adjunct Clinical Faculty at Stanford from 2006-2016, where he cared for melanoma patients. At Genentech from 2006-2018, Daniel focused on the clinical development of anti-angiogenic and immune modulatory targeted therapies in both early and late Development, as well as the diagnostic tools to aid their development. This included leading the clinical development for atezolizumab, a PD-L1 inhibitor, from the time the program was in research through IND, Phase I, Phase II, Phase III, to filing and approvals in multiple indications world-wide. At IGM, Daniel focuses on the development of novel engineered multivalent and multispecific therapeutics. He is a reviewer for Nature, Immunity and Clinical Cancer Research, serves on the Board of Directors for SITC, co-chair of the CRI cancer Immunotherapy consortium, gave the keynote presentation at the AACR NCI EORTC Annual Meeting 2014 and presented at the US Congressional Briefing on Immuno Oncology in 2017. He has continued to publish with academic and industry collaborators in the field of cancer immunotherapy, including the often-referenced Chen and Mellman manuscripts, “Elements of cancer immunity and the cancer-immune set point” and “Oncology meets Immunology: The Cancer-Immunity Cycle.”

Teemu Junttila, PhD, Senior Scientist, Translational Oncology, Genentech, Inc.
Dr. Junttila joined Genentech in 2006. His early work focused on characterizing the impact and mechanism of action of Herceptin (trastuzumab) and Kadcyla (ado-trastuzumab emtansine; T-DM1), in addition to PI3K inhibitors in the treatment of breast cancer. Notably, this work unveiled a previously unknown mechanism of action for Herceptin that was key for understanding the biological underpinning of Perjeta and Herceptin combination synergy (now in clinical use). Currently his research is focused on developing Genentech’s T cell dependent bispecific (TDB) antibodies and he is responsible for multiple CD3-bispecific molecules in various stages, ranging from early stage research to clinical development.
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