Optimizing antibody discovery strategy for clinical success of next-gen immuno-oncology therapeutics

Dr. Patrick Ott is currently the Clinical Director of both the Melanoma Disease Center and the Center for Immuno-Oncology at DFCI, serves as attending physician in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and has an appointment as Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. Dr. Ott received his MD and PhD from Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, Germany. He completed post-doctoral training in Immunology and residency training in Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. After a fellowship in Hematology-Oncology and 4 years on the faculty at New York University, he moved to Dana Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in 2012.

He is a clinical investigator and an integral member of the clinical trials program at Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, where he designs and conducts phase 1 immunotherapy trials for patients with melanoma and a wide range of other tumors. His primary research interests are in melanoma and immunotherapy, specifically the development of innovative tumor vaccine approaches. Dr. Ott has been the Principal Investigator of a first in man clinical trial testing a personalized neoantigen vaccine (NeoVax) in patients with melanoma. The results of the study, reported in in Nature in 2017, established the feasibility and safety of this novel cancer vaccine approach for the first time in a coordinated clinical trial setting. Strong and consistent immunogenicity was demonstrated in patients with high risk melanoma, providing the basis for further testing of this innovative new treatment concept in other cancers. He has been the Principal Investigator and co-investigator on over 30 treatment trials, including those that have been instrumental in the clinical development of the newly FDA approved drugs pembrolizumab and nivolumab for the treatment of advanced melanoma, small cell lung cancer, and many other cancers. This work has resulted in numerous high impact publications including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet Oncology, and the Journal of Clinical Oncology.