Jazmina L. Gonzalez Cruz
Dr. Cruz completed her Ph.D. studies on the immune evasion strategies of Coronaviruses at the National Centre of Biotechnology, Spain, receiving her doctorate with honors in 2011. In 2013, Dr. Cruz began a post-doctoral position, with grant support of the Bayer-Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation to study the role of innate immunity at the portal of entry of human viruses at the Henrich Pette Institute, Germany. In 2015, she joined the A/Prof. Wells Group at The University of Queensland Diamantina Institute awarded with a 3-year UQ early career fellowship to work on the immunology of epithelial cancer. In 2019, under the mentorship of Professor Ian Frazer, Dr. Cruz was awarded a 4-year Garnet Passe & Rodney Williams Memorial Foundation grant to develop her research program focused on uncovering mechanisms involved in the immune suppression of cancer patients. Currently, Dr. Cruz leads the Cancer Immunology and Therapy group at the Translational Research Institute and believes that understanding those cancer-led immunosuppression processes in a subset of Head and Neck cancer, Oropharyngeal Squamous cell carcinoma (OPSCC), is key to provide new focal points for the development of therapeutic strategies aimed at supporting immune function in OPSCC. To unveil these pathways, her team is profiling the blood and tumours of OPSCC patients with high-throughput technologies, such as 10X Genomics Spatial Visium, Nanostring DSP GeoMX, CODEX and multiparametric flow cytometry. Dr. Cruz group foresees that, the correlation of each patient’s disease profile with their clinical history will help to predict the likelihood of future patients to respond to treatment and will assist in the selection of tailored approaches based on each patient’s own disease characteristics.
Abstracts this author is presenting: