MD, FACP
Dr. De Jager has over 40 years of experience in anti-cancer drug development in academic institutions and in the biopharmaceutical industry. Dr. De Jager graduated from the medical school of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium and did his post-graduate training at Lenox Hill Hospital (NYC), the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minn.) and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (NYC). He is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology. He has been on the staff of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer (NYC), the Institut Jules Bordet (Brussels), the Institut de Cancer et d’Immunogenetique (I.C.I.G./Paris), the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) and the MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston). He was a founding member of the E.O.R.T.C. Pharmacokinetics and Metabolism Group and a member of the Early Clinical Trials Group. He also served as an E.C.O.G. principal investigator. His pharmaceutical appointments included Sanofi Research (Paris/Toulouse), the Biotechnology Research Institute (Rockville/MD; AKZO-Nobel), R-Gene Therapeutics (Houston, TX) and Daiichi Pharmaceuticals (Montvale, NJ). He was the Chief Medical Officer of Conforma Therapeutics (Sam Diego, CA), Kosan Biosciences (Hayward, CA), Poniard Pharmaceuticals (South San Francisco, CA) and Retrotope (Los Altos, CA). He developed and performed the first CAF combination chemotherapy for metastatic breast cancer, the first study of cisplatin in lung cancer, the study of mitoxantrone in breast cancer and lymphoma, and a number of other phase I/II and phase III clinical trials. His work also included colorectal cancer vaccination and radio-labeled monoclonal antibodies for the detection and treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer and the mapping of axillary lymph node metastases of breast cancer. More recently he has been involved in the development of HSP90 inhibitors, other targeted drugs and immunotherapy. He has 4 regulatory drug approvals and 200 publications including articles, book chapters and abstracts. Therapeutic areas include: translational oncology and neurology, biomarkers, clinical pharmacology, new chemotherapy and targeted agents, monoclonal antibodies, cancer immunotherapy and vaccines, gene therapy.