Judith A. Varner PhD

Judy Varner is co-founder of Argent Therapeutics, an immunetherapy/oncology biotechnology company. She is a Professor in the Departments of Pathology and Medicine at the University of California, San Diego and a member in the Moores UCSD Cancer Center. She joined the Department of Medicine in 1997 and the Department of Pathology in 2012. Dr. Varner received her undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Duke University, where she was an A.B. Duke and National Merit Scholar and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Basel, Switzerland, where she was a Fulbright Fellow. Prior to coming to UCSD, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she studied integrin signaling in cancer.

As a member of Moores Cancer Center, her research has focused on mechanisms regulating angiogenesis and inflammation in cancer. Her work, which recently appeared in journals that include Cancer Cell, Nature and Cancer Discovery, has identified novel mechanisms by which macrophages promote tumor growth and has developed new approaches to treat cancer patients by targeting tumor macrophage signal transduction. Dr. Varner is recipient of the 2017 V Foundation Award for Translational Research, the 2012 AACR-Landon Foundation Innovator Award for International Collaboration and the 2012 Lustgarten Foundation Innovator Award for Pancreatic Cancer Research.