Jo Van Ginderachter

Jo Van Ginderachter graduated as bio-engineer at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1995 and obtained his PhD in the lab of Cellular and Molecular Immunology at the same university in 2002, studying the impact of the innate and adaptive immune system on the growth and metastasis of mouse lymphoma models. He continued his postdoctoral training in Brussels funded by a competitive Prospective Research for Brussels grant. Jo Van Ginderachter became staff scientist in the Cellular and Molecular Immunology Lab in 2006, Assistant professor at VUB in 2010, Group Leader of VIB in 2012 and Tenure Track Professor of Immunology at VUB in 2014. He is now heading the Cellular and Molecular Immunology Lab as tenured full professor. He is an author of 124 scientific publications, with over 10.000 citations, and 4 book chapters and is inventor on 7 patents. He is also Board member of the Belgian Immunological Society, the Belgian Association for Cancer Research and Flanders Vaccine.

The mission of his lab is to characterize the heterogeneity and function of immunoregulatory cells (monocytes, macrophages, dendritic cells, Treg) in the tumor microenvironment and use these cells as an in vivo sensor to track anti-tumor immunity and as a target for therapeutic intervention. In this respect, his lab pioneered the use of Nanobodies as exquisite tools to target tumor-infiltrating immune cells.