Dr. Giannoula Lakka Klement

Giannoula Lakka Klement, MD, F.R.C.P.(C) started her career as a veterinarian. After immigrating to Canada she re-trained, and entered the field of medicine. She received her MD in 1992 from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and went on to train in Pediatrics at the Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. She finished her Fellowship in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at the Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto in 1997.

At a time when few clinical oncologists entertained the thought of tumor angiogenesis becoming a target for anti-tumor therapy, she decided to focus her research on developing novel antiangiogenic treatments. She received the prestigious National Cancer Institute of Canada Terry Fox Postgraduate Research Fellowship in 1997 to do this work, and joined the laboratory of a prominent scientist, Dr. Robert Kerbel, at the Sunnybrook & Women's College Health Sciences Center, University of Toronto. Her post–doctoral work led to the first publication on metronomic chemotherapy, and caused a paradigm shift in our thinking about anti-cancer therapy. Metronomic chemotherapy continues to be explored in numerous clinical trials, and forms the basis of introduction of most new antiangiogenic agents.

In 2003 Dr. Klement moved to Boston to join the research group of the late Dr. Judah Folkman, to continue research in tumor angiogenesis. She developed a Clinical Experimental Therapeutics Program at the Vascular Anomalies Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children's Hospital Boston. Realizing that the successful clinical introduction of angiogenesis–based therapeutic strategies will require reliable biomarkers for the detection of early tumor growth and/or therapeutic response, Dr. Klement made detection of circulating biomarkers the focus of her basic science laboratory. She discovered that the majority of angiogenesis regulators, both stimulators and inhibitors of angiogenesis are sequestered in platelets and can be detected in platelets very early in tumor growth.

From May 2009 to August 2013 she was an investigator at the Center of Cancer Systems Biology at St. Elizabeth Medical Center.

In 2012 she received a generous donation from the Newman-Lakka Cancer Foundation and became the Director of Newman-Lakka Institute for Personalized Cancer Care, which specializes in the treatment of children and adults with difficult to treat cancers using combinations of metronomic and targeted therapies. The mission of the Institute is to evaluate and validate this approach and to provide leadership for the implementation of targeted therapies in clinics. In order to maximize the translation of novel therapeutic concepts to clinic, she has moved the research laboratory to Tufts Medical Center Cancer Center in 2013.