ISCT Open Access Webinars

Mitchell Cairo, MD
Immediate Past ISCT North America Regional Vice-President
New York Medical College
United States

Antonio Carlos Campos de Carvalho, MD, PhD
ISCT South & Central America Regional Vice-President
Institute Of Biophysics, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Brazil

Neeha Zaidi, MD
Johns Hopkins University
United States 

Overview of mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from COVID-19 Vaccines

Dr. Neeha Zaidi is Assistant Professor of Oncology and a GI medical oncologist at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. Her work focuses on the development of novel precision immunotherapeutic strategies for the treatment and prevention of pancreatic cancer. She received her undergraduate degree (Magna Cum Laude) in Biology from Cornell University and earned her M.D. from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where she graduated with Distinction in Research and was awarded the Jeffrey Modell Clinical Immunology Prize.  During medical school, she spent a year as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Research Fellow at The Rockefeller University studying dendritic cell vaccines under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Ralph Steinman.  She completed her residency in internal medicine at Weill Cornell and subsequently received an Intramural Research Training Award to perform a year-long post-doctoral fellowship at the Vaccine Research Center (NIAID) at the NIH.  She then completed a fellowship in medical oncology at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins under the mentorship of Dr. Elizabeth Jaffee.  Dr. Zaidi then joined the Johns Hopkins faculty as Assistant Professor in 2019, and her laboratory focuses on developing and testing novel personalized immunotherapy approaches for the treatment and prevention of pancreatic cancer.  Her work has led to the initiation of clinical trials that utilize personalized vaccines in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors for the treatment of these otherwise immune-resistant cancers. She has also initiated and is the PI on the first clinical trial testing a cancer prevention vaccine for those who are at high-risk of developing pancreatic cancer. Dr. Zaidi has most recently been recognized with an ASCO Career Development Award and the NCI K08 Award.

David Avigan, MD
Beth Israel Deaconess, Harvard Medical School
United States

Dr. David Avigan received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and in 1989 completed his M.D. at Yale University School of Medicine. He did his internal medicine and residency training at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center from 1989-1993, and from 1992-1993 he was the chief resident of Internal Medicine. From 1993-1996, he was a fellow, and later, chief fellow in Hematology/Oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and research fellow at Rockefeller University. Dr. David Avigan joined the attending staff of Hematology/Oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in 1996, and became the chief of Hematological Malignancies and Bone Marrow Transplant Section in 2014, chief of the Hematology and Hematologic Malignancies Division in 2019, and director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Cancer Center in 2022. He is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Avigan has established a translational research program for cancer vaccines at BIDMC as part of the Dana Farber Harvard Cancer Center. Laboratory efforts have focused on the development of dendritic cell based vaccines including a model in which patient derived tumor cells are fused with dendritic cells as a novel patient specific vaccine. Based on these findings, he has supervised a series of clinical trials to examine the immunologic and clinical efficacy of this vaccine strategy for patients with hematologic malignancies and solid tumors. His work has been supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation.

Lisa Butterfield, PhD
University of California, San Francisco
United States

Lisa H. Butterfield, Ph.D. is an Adjunct Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, University California San Francisco and a consultant in immuno-oncology. Her research is focused on cancer vaccines, immune profiling and cellular therapies for melanoma, hepatocellular cancer and other tumor types. Dr. Butterfield was most recently Vice President, Research and Development at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, where she supported cell therapy initiatives and clinical trial biospecimen and biomarker projects. Previously, she was a tenured Professor of Medicine, Surgery, Immunology and Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Pittsburgh (2003-2018) and Director of the Hillman Cancer Center Immunologic Monitoring and Cellular Products Laboratory. She has a PhD in Biology from UCLA, followed by postdoctoral fellowships in Cellular Immunology and Cancer Gene Therapy also at UCLA. She was the President of the Society of Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC, 2017-2018) and a member of the SITC Executive Committee (2015-2020). She led the Immunology Reference Lab for the ECOG-ACRIN NCI cooperative group (2006-2018) and collaborates on biomarker studies in many clinical trials. She has published over 185 peer-reviewed manuscripts, reviews and book chapters, and mentored over 20 students and postdocs. She co-leads the SITC Women’s Leadership Institute and is a co-Editor of the SITC textbook “Cancer Immunotherapy: Principles and Practice” 1^st and 2^nd editions.