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Focus of research
Tanja de Gruijl heads the Immunotherapy and Immune monitoring Lab of the Department of Medical Oncology at the Cancer Center of the Amsterdam university medical centers, where she has been appointed Professor of Translational Tumour Immunology and holds a Fenna Diemer Lindeboom Chair. She has over 25 years of experience in the field of tumour immunology and over 250 publications to her name. Her research ranges from preclinical topics to immune monitoring of Phase I-III clinical trials and includes topics like the immune potentiation of tumour-draining lymph nodes and the tumour microenvironment, immunological arming of oncolytic adenoviruses, and nanobody-mediated targeting of (NK)T-cell subsets. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the EU-Horizon2020 program, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and the Royal Dutch Cancer Society (KWF) and she is a recipient of a competitive research award of the Prostate Cancer Foundation. She has supervised the initial research that has led to the vaccination platform of DCPrime BV (now Immunicum) and is co-founder of LAVA Therapeutics. She serves as associate editor for Cancer Immunology Research, the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, and Clinical and Experimental Immunology. She has been and is a member of the grant review committees of the Royal Dutch Cancer Society (KWF) and the Melanoma Research Alliance, has chaired the Dutch Tumour Immunology Working Party, and is an elected member of the board of directors of the Society for the Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC).