Personalized RNA Vaccines for Pancreatic Cancer

Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology Seminar

Vinod Balachandran, MD

Vinod Balachandran, MD is a surgeon-scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Balachandran completed his undergraduate work in Physics at Cornell University, his MD at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, general surgery residency at Weill Cornell’s New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and fellowship training in surgical oncology at MSKCC. During his surgery training, he pursued postdoctoral work in tumor immunology at the Sloan Kettering Institute, where he identified that kinase inhibitors had partial immune-mediated anti-tumor effects, providing key evidence that kinase inhibitors can be combined with immunotherapy. In 2015, Dr. Balachandran joined Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center as faculty, where he now serves as a principal investigator in the Immuno-Oncology Service of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program (HOPP) and an Assistant Attending Surgeon in the Hepatopancreatobiliary Service in the Department of Surgery. 

In the clinic, he specializes in the surgical and oncologic care of pancreatic cancer patients and conducts immunotherapy clinical trials. In the laboratory, he leads a basic and translational research program focused on the discovery and application of next-generation cancer immunotherapies for pancreatic cancer. His laboratory studies rare long-term pancreatic cancer survivors and has uncovered key antigens and cells in these patients’ tumors that contribute to their exceptional outcome, findings which are now being translated into therapies for patients.

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