Saghar Kaabinejandian

Dr. Saghar Kaabinejadian has more than 15 years of experience in cancer research, with specific expertise in characterization of the peptides that are presented by HLA of the cancerous and/or infected cells. She currently serves as the Director of Immuno-Oncology at Pure MHC.

She earned her Pharm.D. and Ph.D. degree in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology in 2008 from Tehran University of Medical Sciences. Her Ph.D. research was focused on the identification of novel biomarkers for breast cancer and analysis of the effects of chemotherapeutic agents on the expression of selected cancer biomarkers at transcriptional and translational levels. After graduation, she held positions as quality control (QC) consultant and production manager in the pharmaceutical industry.

In 2011, Dr. Kaabinejadian joined Dr. Hildebrand’s lab as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to further pursue her research interests in the identification of biologic properties unique to infected/cancerous cells. She also served as the project manager of the NIH-funded project “Discovery and Targeting of West Nile Virus Epitopes” during which she gained extensive experience working with different flaviviruses (WNV, Kunjin and Zika) and studying the mechanisms underlying processing and presentation of viral epitopes as well as their immunodominance using TCRm mAbs.

In addition, to pursue her passion for cancer research, Dr. Kaabinejadian worked with other researchers on several cancer projects, including identification of Platinum-resistance biomarkers in ovarian cancer and studying the processing and presentation of neoantigens on the surface of melanoma cells. In a collaboration with scientists at Washington University, she developed a cell culture system using human melanoma cells with soluble HLA class I molecules and a tandem minigene construct (TMC) to validate the presentation of the personalized neoantigens for testing in a Dendritic cell vaccine clinical trial (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00683670). Among the first three vaccinated patients, one patient developed a complete response after sequential anti-PD-1 therapy. In this patient, vaccine induced neoantigen-specific T cells were detected more than one year after the last vaccination. This observation was the first evidence in humans that vaccines targeting cancer neoantigens promote amplification of T cell immunity. The result of this clinical trial was published in journal of Science in 2015 and captured media attention nationally and internationally