The Fall 2024 Biology Seminar Series continues with a talk from Dr. Ite Offringa, "Leveraging a naturally-occurring immune response as a small cell lung cancer therapy." The seminar is on Tuesday, October 8th, at 12:00pm.
Dr. Ite Offringa was born in the Netherlands but lived in Spain, Venezuela, and the Caribbean before pursuing her BS, MS, and PhD at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, she started her lung cancer research lab at the Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, at the University of Southern California in 1996. Dr. Offringa is an expert in the molecular biology and epigenomics of lung cancer and has led and participated in many interdisciplinary collaborations with clinicians, epidemiologists and biostatisticians. The Offringa lab developed immortalized human alveolar epithelial cells which form alveolar organoids in 3 dimensional culture and provide a new tool to study diseases of the peripheral lung, including cancer. The Offringa lab also studies a small cell lung cancer (SCLC)-associated autoimmune response seen in ~15% of  patients and associated with improved survival. As leader of an international research team, Dr.Offringa solved a decades-old mystery and identified the molecular alteration believed to trigger this autoimmune response. The lab is using this knowledge to develop new therapies for SCLC using a pre-clinical mouse model. Besides her devotion to lung cancer research, Dr. Offringa is passionate about science education. She currently serves as Associate Dean of Graduate Affairs at USC, in which capacity she oversees the education of all PhD students at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. Dr. Offringa is also the USC Research Education Core leader of a tri-university NIH/NCI Comprehensive Partnership to Advance Cancer Health Equity (CPACHE) grant.