The goal of the NextGen Precision Health & Ellis Fischel Cancer Center Science Seminar is to highlight transdisciplinary precision research taking place in the cancer field, provide opportunities for collaboration among researchers to build their own research efforts and promote clinical/researcher activity across the University of Missouri System and our partners.

For questions about this event, please reach out to Veronica Lemme.

Addressing Cancer with Immunomodulatory Therapeutics

Speaker: Paul DeFigueiredo, PhD, NextGen Precision Health Endowed Professor, Molecular Microbiology & Immunology, Veterinary Pathobiology, University of Missouri-Columbia

Date: Oct. 19, 2023, 4:30-5:30 p.m.

Location: Roy Blunt NextGen Precision Health Building, Atkins Family Seminar Room

*Zoom option available

Register Here
 

Description

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States, with more than 600,000 deaths annually. Dr. DeFigueiredo will present his interdisciplinary collaborative team’s efforts to fight cancer by developing a new generation of bacterial systems with potent anti-cancer activities, especially when deployed in the context of immunotherapeutic interventions.

About the Speaker

Paul is a Professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Missouri School of Medicine and in the Department of Veterinary Pathobiology in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Missouri. He is also an investigator at the Christopher S. Bond Life Science Center.  Paul holds degrees from Rice University (B.A., Mathematics and Political Science), Stanford (M.A., Religious Studies), and Cornell (Ph.D., Biochemistry, Molecular, and Cell Biology), and completed postdoctoral training at MIT and the University of Washington. He has broad experience and training in molecular biology, cell biology, microbiology, and biochemistry, with specific expertise in host-pathogen interactions and biotechnology development. He also has an emerging research program to develop bacterial therapeutics for addressing cancer and other diseases (Guo et al, JITC 2022; Das et al., Gut Microbes, 2022; Plocica et al., J. Trans. Autoimmun., 2023) Paul has collaborated successfully with engineers, material scientists, and computational biologists to pioneer the development of high throughput, microsystem tools and materials technologies that illuminate novel biological processes. He has led large, multi-institutional, interdisciplinary projects and has cofounded several biotech companies, including Suho Biotechnology, LLC, HelioWave Technologies, LLC, and Tranquility Biodesign, LLC.  Paul has mentored 59 undergraduate students, including 30 under-represented minorities (URMs). Notably, 28 of these students worked in my lab, and 30 were co-mentored under the auspices of an NSF-sponsored, diversity-directed summer research program, which I co-directed. Paul has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications, and has been the PI or co-PI on awards from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, NIH, NSF, USDA, Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Qatar National Research Foundation (QNRF), and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), as well as several private foundations in the past five years.