Jeanette H. W. Leusen PhD

Dr. Jeanette Leusen, received her PhD in 1995 at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her entry into the field of therapeutic antibodies and their modes of action began when she was awarded a prestigious fellowship from the Netherlands Scientific Organization (NWO). She is actively involved in the in vivo studies of therapeutic antibodies using several mouse models. Within the immunotherapy group, a unique panel of Fc receptor knock-out and transgenic animals has been developed and obtained over the past decades (e.g. Immunity, 2001; Cancer Research 2006, J.Immunol, 2014). Supported by grants from KWF and AICR, Dr. Leusen’s lab has generated and characterized a new transgenic mouse reconstituting FcR expression but incapable of ADCC. Interestingly, in both lymphoid and solid tumor models, therapy with several mAbs was completely abrogated in our ADCC-deficient model (Cancer Research, 2010, J. Immunol 2014, J. exp. Med 2017). Last but not least, Dr. Leusen strongly believes in IgA as a novel class of antibody for treatment of both malignant as infectious disease. In 2013 she published for the first time in vivo efficacy of IgA antibodies (EMBO MM, 2013), but more studies were published in Cancer Immunol Res 2015, MABs 2015, Cancer res 2015 and 2016, and a review in Mol Imm 2015.