Helix BioPharma Corp. (TSX:HBP) has announced the appointment of Dr Gabrielle Siegers as its head of research and development based out of the company's lab in Edmonton.
Dr Siegers comes to Helix from IN8bio, a US biotech company developing Gamma Delta T Cell immunotherapies for cancer, where she served as senior scientist/Gamma Delta T Cell specialist, the clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company said.
"We are delighted to welcome Dr Gabrielle Siegers as a key addition to the team. We are confident that she will lead our R&D team toward success and help them to make significant breakthroughs in the field of immune oncology," Helix CEO Artur Gabor said in a statement.
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The Ontario-based Helix said Dr Siegers was a research associate with the Department of Experimental Oncology at the University of Alberta following postdoctoral studies in Dr Lynne-Marie Postovit's laboratory, where she studied how the tumour microenvironment impacts immune cell function.
Prior to this, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Dr Paula Foster, a world-renowned cellular MRI expert at Robarts Research Institute, where she continued research begun in the Translational Cell Therapy Program with Dr Armand Keating at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Canada.
Commenting on her appointment, Dr Siegers said: "I am delighted to join Helix in this exciting capacity, to put my knowledge and skills toward further development of Helix's promising new cancer therapies for patients."
The company noted that Dr Siegers, who obtained her PhD in Molecular Immunology at the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology and the University of Freiburg in Germany, has published several original research articles, reviews and book chapters with international and cross-disciplinary collaborators, currently 32 publications on PubMed. She has also been invited to give talks at national and international meetings in Canada, the United States and Germany.
Helix BioPharma is developing unique therapies in the field of immune-oncology for the prevention and treatment of cancer based on the proprietary technology platform DOS47.
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