Claire Vanpouille-Box

Weill Cornell Medicine, United States

Claire Vanpouille-Box is an Assistant Professor of Cell Biology in Radiation Oncology. She developed a keen interest in anti-cancer treatments based on the combination of immunotherapy and radiation therapy (RT). Her graduate work at the University of Angers (France), studied a new treatment concept that aims at generating a localized RT via the use of nanoparticles during which she became interested in radiation-induced anti-tumor immunity. 

She then conducted her postdoctoral training  at NYU School of Medicine and at Weill Cornell Medicine whose preclinical studies demonstrated that TGFb is a master regulator of RT-induced anti-tumor immunity and that RT-induced cancer-cell type I interferon is required to elicit durable regression of the irradiated and non-irradiated tumor (i.e., the abscopal effect). 

Claire has received many prestigious awards among which the 2014-Marie Curie Award from the Radiation Research Society (RRS) and the 2015-AACR Susan G Komen Scholar-in-training award from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). 

She serves as associate editor for the Journal of Translational Medicine and Radiation Research.

The main focus of her group is to investigate the key factors impacting the immunogenicity of radiotherapy in brain malignancies. More specifically, the Vanpouille-Box lab aims at exploring the immune-metabolic role of radiation therapy and to define the impact of TGF-beta and activin A in the radiation response of glioblastomas. With a better understanding of the metabolic changes, molecular pathways and cellular responses from the host and/or the tumor that result from radiation therapy, our main goal is to identify new actionable targets for the modulation of anti-tumor immune responses against glioblastomas.