Dr. Giannoula Lakka Klement
Giannoula Lakka Klement, MD, F.R.C.P.(C) started her career as a veterinarian. After immigrating to Canada she re-trained, and entered the field of medicine. She received her MD in 1992 from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and went on to train in Pediatrics at the Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto in Canada. She finished her Fellowship in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at the Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto in 1997.
At a time when few clinical oncologists entertained the thought of tumor angiogenesis becoming a target for anti-tumor therapy, she decided to focus her research on developing novel antiangiogenesis targeted therapies. She received the prestigious National Cancer Institute of Canada Terry Fox Postgraduate Research Fellowship in 1997 to do this work, and joined the laboratory of a prominent scientist, Dr. Robert Kerbel, at the Sunnybrook & Women's College Health Sciences Center, University of Toronto. Her post–doctoral work led to the first publication on metronomic chemotherapy, and caused a paradigm shift in our thinking about anti-cancer therapy. Metronomic chemotherapy continues to be explored in numerous clinical trials, and forms the basis of introduction of most new targetted therapies.
In 2003 Dr. Klement moved to Boston to join the research group of the late Dr. Judah Folkman. As a clinician scientist, she developed a Clinical Experimental Therapeutics Program at the Vascular Anomalies Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children's Hospital Boston. Realizing that the successful clinical introduction of angiogenesis–based therapeutic strategies requires reliable biomarkers for the detection of early tumor growth and/or therapeutic response, Dr. Lakka Klement made detection of circulating biomarkers the focus of her basic science laboratory. She discovered that the majority of angiogenesis regulators, both stimulators and inhibitors of angiogenesis, are sequestered in platelets.
From May 2009 she was an investigator at the Center of Cancer Systems Biology at St. Elizabeth Medical Center, and moved her laboratory to Tufts Medical Center in August 2013.
In 2012 she received a generous donation from the Newman-Lakka Cancer Foundation and became the Director of Newman-Lakka Institute for Personalized Cancer Care at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. The Institute specialized in the treatment of children and adults with cancers refractory to standard therapies. Its mission was to evaluate and validate the use of a combination of metronomic chemotherapy and targeted therapies selected on the basis of genomics. The institute also provided leadership for the implementation of targeted therapies in clinics.
In 2015 she joined Ali Hashemi, an expert in arteficial intelligence hybrid reasoning systems in creating a biotech start up CSTS Health care. The long term goal of the company is to create Next Generation Oncology - where cancer therapy is administered at local cancer centers empowered by complex sociotechnical systems (CSTS) to provide patients with individualized targeted therapies and tumor targeted drug delivery.
