2011 Mentored Investigator Grant Recipient — Gregory Motz, PhD
Project Summary
Cancer vaccines, or treatments that enhance a patient’s immune system to fight tumor cells, hold great promise as a therapy for ovarian cancer. However, existing immunotherapies for ovarian cancer have been limited, highlighting the need for new approaches to achieve immunotherapy’s full potential for ovarian cancer. In Dr. Motz’s research, he aims to create special T-cells, or immune cells, that will be very effective in killing tumor cells. He will be working with a mouse model of ovarian cancer, but his findings could someday be applied to patient care.
This grant is supported in part by a generous donation from Teal There’s a Cure.
Bio
Dr. Gregory Motz is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. George Coukos at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his doctoral thesis on the immune response in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at the University of Cincinnati. He has since redirected his research interests to focus on the immune response in ovarian cancer. He is currently interested in cancer vaccines, barriers to anti-tumor immunity, and angiogenesis in tumor immunology.