Olivia Rossanese,
Head of Biology and Reader, CR UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit
Dr Olivia Rossanese is a cancer biologist and drug discovery professional with experience leading and contributing to discovery and target validation programs within both academia and the pharmaceutical industry. She has been involved with the identification of tool molecules, lead compounds, clinical candidates, and 2 FDA-approved medicines currently in use for the treatment of metastatic melanoma. In 2015, she joined The Institute of Cancer Research as Head of Biology and Reader of Molecular Therapeutics in the CRUK Cancer Therapeutics Unit, where she currently leads the Target Evaluation & Molecular Therapeutics team. Dr Rossanese is trained as a classical cell biologist, obtaining her PhD in Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology from the University of Chicago, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Section of Microbial Pathogenesis at Yale University. In both instances, she was examining basic cellular and molecular processes employed by mammalian cells to overcome challenges in organelle partitioning or intracellular trafficking.
Dr Rossanese gained her industrial preclinical drug discovery experience in the Oncology Biology group at GlaxoSmithKline in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was a member of the dabrafenib discovery team (Tafinlar; FDA approval May 2013) and contributed to the due diligence decision regarding in-licensing of the MEK inhibitor trametinib (Mekinist, FDA approval May 2013). She also led discovery and validation teams against targets involved in cell growth, survival, motility, EMT and metastasis, and modulators of epigenetic signalling in cancer. In 2010, Dr Rossanese joined Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee to establish a cancer biology group in support of the academic oncology drug discovery program. Here she continued to pursue the discovery of molecularly targeted therapeutics for important targets in cancer, including Ras, MCL1, and Replication Protein A. An exciting output of this work is the discovery of novel molecules that activate the nucleotide exchange process on Ras and may represent a novel mechanism for the disruption of Ras-mediated signalling in cancer cells.
|
|
