Dr. Gabriele Bergers is a Professor of Oncology at the University of Leuven and a group leader at the Vlaams Instituut Voor Biotechnologie (VIB)-Center for Cancer Biology in Leuven since 2016. Prior, she followed the faculty rank at the University of California, San Francisco, and was a Professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery and a PI in the Brain Tumor Research Center (BTRC) at the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco until 2016.

The overall research interest of her group relates to the tumor vasculature, which entails an integral and critical component of the tumor microenvironment and closely interacts with distinct cell constituents of the heterogeneous tumor community. Such crosstalk is pivotal not only for the genesis and progression of a tumor but also for the tumor’s ability to resist therapeutic elimination.

Over the last years, her group has made seminal discoveries in the heterogenous crosstalk of the vascular immune axis and identified several intimate regulatory mechanisms between angiogenesis and immunosuppression that provide novel target possibilities to enhance the effects of cancer therapy by modulating the tumor vascular system and its communication with immune cells; among those, to induce high endothelial venules and subsequent tertiary lymphoid structures, with the overarching goal to sensitize and enhance an immune response in cancer patients to thwart tumors and metastases and invigorate tissue homeostasis.

For her research, Dr. Bergers has received several awards, including the Sidney Kimmel, the Sandler Opportunity, UCSF Breakthrough Biomedical Research, and the Judah Folkman Award. She has acted as an external advisory board member for a number of universities and pharmaceutical companies; most recently for Mestag Therapeutics. Dr. Bergers was the co-director of the U54 Tumor microenvironment Brain Tumor Center at UCSF until 2016. She is a Scientific co-founder of Oncurious.