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Dr. Marta Barisa is a Senior Fellow in Experimental Oncology at University College London (UCL). She is based at the Cancer Section of UCL’s Zayed Centre of the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health.She completed her undergraduate degree at St. George’s Hospital Medical School in London, UK, followed by training in molecular immunology and cellular immunotherapy at UCL, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, USA. Most of her career has focused on immunotherapy drug development for various oncology indications — alone or in combination with additional immunotherapeutic, radio- and chemotherapeutic interventions.For much of her research career she has been based at UCL, which is a world-leading centre for cellular immunotherapy development. It is one of a few institutions dominating global innovation in the space; more than 400 CAR-T patents and 40 patent families have been registered by UCL alone. The Institute of Child Health, where Dr. Barisa is based, is closely associated with Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. The hospital, with its associated research institute, is Europe’s biggest and highest-ranked centre for paediatric health, excelling particularly with the quality and quantity of its translational research that is coupled to clinical trials.Dr. Barisa’s specialism rests with the design, development and translation of genetically-modified adoptive cellular immunotherapies for solid tumours. In this capacity she is based across two different immunotherapy groups at UCL: (i) the Innate Immune Engineering Lab, which is focused on allogeneic, gene-modified γδ T cell therapeutic development for adolescent and adult solid cancers, including carcinoma and sarcoma, and (ii) the Experimental Paediatric Oncology Lab, where she evaluates a range of autologous as well as allogeneic chimeric antigen receptor (CAR-T) αβ and γδ T cell interventions for their ability to target paediatric neuroendocrine tumours.Throughout her career, she has woven together academic and commercial cell therapy development. She has held roles in both private biotech companies and academic institutions - often building novel cell therapy concepts in the academic space, and then funding the late-stage development of these with commercial partners. She serves on scientific advisory boards and holds patents pertaining to novel cellular immunotherapy designs and manufacturing methodologies. She lectures on cell therapy development regularly, and is a co-lead of a postgraduate programme for Cell & Gene Therapy at UCL.

• 1. Exploiting fundamental γδ T cell immunobiology in cancer immunotherapy: seven steps towards a Great Leap Forwards2. Examining γδ T cell receptor (γδ-TCR) structure and signalling in the context of cellular immunotherapy design3. γδT cell immunotherapy: requirement for combinations?4. Appraising ???? T Cell Exhaustion and Differentiation in the Context of Synthetic Engineering for Cancer Immunotherapy5. γδ T Cells for Cancer Immunotherapy: a 2023 Comprehensive Systematic Review of Clinical Trials6. Allograft persistence: the next frontier for allogeneic γδT cell therapy