The Centre for Cancer Immunology is delighted to welcome Professors Sally Ward and Raimund Ober who will be heading up a joint multidisciplinary laboratory.
Sally and Raimund join the Centre from Texas AM University and are leaders in the field of antibody-based therapeutics.
Sally’s main field of research involves finding new ways to engineer antibodies to help them destroy cancer cells and understanding how the cancer cells respond to different types of antibodies.
Using advanced microscopy techniques Raimund’s expertise lies in developing new super-resolution imaging techniques to study the fate of therapeutic anti-cancer antibodies as they attack cancer cells. This research will enable clinicians to select antibody-based drugs that are delivered to the appropriate compartments within cells to obtain positive therapeutic effects in patients.
Their pre-clinical research will mainly focus on breast and prostate cancers – expanding Southampton’s immunotherapy research programmes which include lung cancer, head and neck cancer, neuroblastoma and several types of blood cancer.
Raimund said: “Southampton has a remarkable reputation for taking basic scientific discoveries from the lab through to clinical practice and it is very exciting to be a part of that.”
Sally added: “We’ve interacted with Southampton researchers in the past and the opportunity to come to the first Centre in the UK to be dedicated to cancer immunology research was too good to miss.”
Professor Tim Elliott, Director of the Centre for Cancer Immunology, said: “We are thrilled to welcome Sally and Raimund to Southampton. They are both world-class in their respective fields and their interdisciplinary approach fits very well with our vision to take patient-focussed cancer immunology research to a new level.”
