Jane Grogan

Jane L. Grogan (born 8 July 1966) is an Australian-born, US-based scientist specializing in immunology and cancer research. She is the executive vice president and head of research at Biogen.

Research

Grogan's cancer research focuses on mechanisms of T cell activation, tolerance-induction and epigenetic modifiers, using integrative approaches, combining bioinformatics, biology and diagnostics. Most significantly at Genentech, Grogan and her lab identified key regulators of effector and regulatory T cells and moved targets into clinical development for autoimmune and oncology indications including anti-lymphotoxin in rheumatoid arthritis and anti-TIGIT for cancer immunotherapy

Immunotherapies that harness the activity of the immune system against tumors are proving to be an effective therapeutic approach in multiple malignancies. However, tumors can also suppress these responses by activating negative regulatory pathways and checkpoints. Blocking these checkpoints on T cells has provided dramatic clinical benefit, but only a subset of patients exhibit clear and durable responses, suggesting that other mechanisms must be limiting the immune response. Grogan and collaborators have identified that TIGIT, an inhibitory receptor expressed by lymphocytes, may play a role in limiting antitumor responses. TIGIT suppresses T cell activation by promoting the generation of mature immunoregulatory dendritic cells

Background

Grogan was born in Geelong, Victoria, Australia. She completed her undergraduate degree in science at the University of Melbourne, Australia and a PhD in Immunology at Leiden University in The Netherlands. Her post-doctoral training was at the German Rheumatism Research Centre Berlin (DRFZ) in Berlin as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow.

She then moved to the United States to take up a position as a Howard Hughes Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco before joining Genentech in 2004. She served as the chief scientific officer of ArsenalBio in September 2019. She then served as the chief scientific officer of Graphite Bio.

Grogan is on the advisory board of the Sustainable Science Institute and was the founder and the original host of the science journalism podcast produced by Genentech called Two Scientists Walk Into a Bar.

External links

• Jane Grogan publications indexed by Google Scholar