Jingjing Zhu

Jingjing Zhu obtained her PhD in Biomedicine from KULeuven in 2013, pioneering high-specificity nanobodies targeting furin for anti-cancer therapy. She then joined Prof. Benoit Van den Eynde's lab for her post-doc training, unraveling immunosuppressive mechanisms in cancer and enhancing immunotherapy. Notably, she discovered tumor-infiltrating T cell apoptosis due to Fas ligand, a key immune-suppressive mechanism (Nat Commun 2017, Cancer Immunol Immunother 2019). Since 2017, she became a Team leader within the lab unit of Benoit Van den Eynde focusing on innovative strategies and drug targets for clinical use. With her team, she identified poor anti-PD-L1 antibody tumor penetration as a limiting factor for the effectiveness of anti-PD-L1 treatment. The team developed a method for targeted delivery of anti-PD L1 nanobodies to the tumor site using specific anti-tumor CD8 T cells producing the anti-PD L1 nanobodies at the tumor site. This results in significantly better tumor control in a mouse model (Cancer Immunol Res 2022). The team recently published adrenergic receptor alpha-2 as an immunotherapeutic target in Nature (2023) with relevant patents. As a group leader at De Duve Institute, she continues groundbreaking research, aiming at advancing cancer immunotherapy and translating research into impactful clinical outcomes.