Rimas Orentas, PhD

Rimas Orentas, PhD
  • Academic Title: Professor, Pediatrics
  • Research Title: Principal Investigator, Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute and Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research
"My passion is to understand how the immune system can be brought to bear on childhood cancer. Using the advanced tools that genomics provides, and the ability to engineer T cells with gene vectors, our lab works to unravel the defense mechanisms that tumors employ to avoid detection and elimination, and to engineer T cells to recognize and destroy malignant cells, with a special emphasis on solid tumors like rhabdomyosarcoma, osteosarcoma and neuroblastoma."

  • Biography

    I graduated with a bachelor's degree in Microbiology from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a PhD from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences. After a post-doctoral fellowship and research associate position at the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center, I was appointed to the faculty of the Medical College of Wisconsin. There I rose to the rank of Associate Professor with a primary appointment in Pediatrics, Section of Hematology-Oncology, with additional appointments in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and the Department of Medicine. I then worked at Lentigen Corp., focusing on lentiviral gene vector development for the transduction of human T cells and hematopoietic stem cells. This was followed by an appointment as a staff scientist and then associate scientist in the Pediatric Oncology Branch of the National Cancer Institute's Center for Cancer Research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I then returned to Lentigen Technology, Inc., a Miltenyi Biotec Company where I served as scientific director, establishing a basic science and clinical therapeutics program. Currently I am a principal investigator at the Ben Towne Center for Cancer Research at Seattle Children's Research Institute.

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