Lana Kandalaft
Prof. Lana Kandalaft is one of the key members of the Swiss Cancer Center in Lausanne Switzerland. She is currently the Chief of service of the Center of Experimental Therapeutics, an integrated structure of clinical services, manufacturing facilities and laboratory platforms in the Department of Oncology, at the CHUV and the Swiss Cancer Center Lausanne aiming to take new cellular therapies from the lab to the clinic. She also is Associate Director of clinical translation at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Lausanne Branch, Associate Professor at the University of Lausanne as of August 1st, 2021 and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Medicine, and Associate Professor at the University of Lausanne, School of Biology & Medicine.
Prof. Kandalaft holds a Doctorate in Pharmacy and a PhD from the Welsh School of Pharmacy at Cardiff University, UK, and a Master's Degree in Translational Research from the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship training at The National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, focusing on preclinical animal models and cancer therapeutics. She then continued working at The NCI as a senior research fellow before joining the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where she held an appointment as an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Ovarian Cancer Research Center working on personalized vaccine development in ovarian cancer patients.
She also was the Director of Clinical Development and Operations of the Ovarian Cancer Research Center at University of Pennsylvania where she played a crucial role in the development and implementation of cell-based and gene therapy clinical protocols.
Prof. Kandalaft has strong expertise in clinical development, regulatory policies and translational research. She is interested in translational cell based cancer immunotherapies with a special focus on immunotherapy of ovarian cancer. She currently has a dual appointment of heading the Center of Experimental Therapeutics and a basic laboratory, which focuses on developing novel strategies for personalized vaccines taking them from bench to bedside.