Dr. Kunle Odunsi
Dr. Kunle Odunsi (Male). He is the Cancer Center Deputy Director at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is also Professor and Chair of the Department of Gynecologic Oncology, the M. Steven Piver Endowed Professor of Gynecologic Oncology, Executive Director of the Center for Immunotherapy at Roswell Park; and Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Buffalo. He maintains an active independent laboratory research program that focuses on understanding the mechanisms of immune recognition and tolerance in human ovarian cancer, and translation of the findings to clinical immunotherapy trials. He has pioneered the development of antigen specific vaccine therapy for prolonging remission rates in patients with ovarian cancer. His laboratory has identified important mechanisms of immune suppression with the ovarian tumor microenvironment; and he has developed strategies to counteract such. He is currently pioneering studies to “re-engineer” mature T cells and hematopoietic stem cells for generating sustained attack against ovarian cancer in patients. He has developed and implemented protocols for multi-institutional immunotherapy clinical trials under the umbrella of the NCI Cancer Immunotherapy Trials Network (CITN); the NCTN (NRG); ETCTN; and the Cancer Vaccine Collaborative (CVC) program of the Cancer Research Institute/Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. He is a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Science. In 2018, he was elected to the United States National Academy of Medicine.