City of Hope in Duarte, California, recently announced the following new appointments.
Susanne G. Warner, MD
Dr. Warner has been appointed Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Surgery. She received her medical degree from Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, where she was selected as a member of the Gold Humanism Honor Society. She pursued her training as a general surgery resident at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, where she was appointed to the hospital Ethics Committee.
In 2010, Dr. Warner completed a research fellowship in Yuman Fong, MD’s laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Following her residency, Dr. Warner completed a clinical fellowship in hepatopancreatobiliary and advanced gastrointestinal surgery at the University of Michigan Medical Center, where she was also a clinical lecturer.
Dr. Warner’s research interests include clinical applications of oncolytic viral therapies and humanities research centered on the spiritual, emotional, and physical optimization of the perioperative
patient experience.
Ling Li, PhD
Dr. Li has been appointed Assistant Professor in the Gehr Family Center for Leukemia Research and Division of Hematopoietic Stem Cell and Leukemia Research. His research focuses on studying the aberrantly regulated epigenetics that initiate or maintain the leukemia specifically acute myeloid leukemia (AML). He was the first to report that aberrant activity of SIRT1leads to deacetylation and, therefore, suppression of p53-signaling contributing to survival of leukemia stem cells.
Dr. Li’s laboratory is currently determining the epigenetic-related resistance mechanisms of leukemia stem cells to the treatment of tyrosine kinase inhibitors. The primary goal of this effort is to develop novel therapeutics to specifically target leukemia stem cells and advance these strategies for clinical trials in AML.
Edwin R. Manuel, PhD
Dr. Manuel has been appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Experimental Therapeutics. His current research focuses on approaches to overcome mechanisms of tumor escape, which is an important hallmark of cancer that can significantly compromise the efficacy of current immunotherapeutic strategies.
Dr. Manuel has developed a bacterial-based approach that effectively targets a variety of immunosuppressive proteins to rescue antitumor responses in preclinical models of melanoma and pancreatic cancer. Using this platform, he is also exploring additional cancer-specific targets, such as oncogenes required for tumor survival, as another approach to induce growth arrest in primary tumor cells and cancer stem cells in pancreatic cancer.
Irina Chilian, MD
Dr. Chilian has been appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Specialists, specializing in neurology. She joins City of Hope after being in private practice for 13 years and serving as a consultant to City of Hope since 2012.
Dr. Chilian earned her medical degree from Yerevan State Medical University in Armenia. While in Armenia, she continued her education with an internship in internal medicine and military field surgery training, before serving as a staff internist at Razdan County Hospital.
Dr. Chilian then pursued her postgraduate training beginning in 1996 with a clerkship in psychiatry at the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, California. She completed an externship in pediatrics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she also volunteered as an attending scientist in kidney transplant immunology.
She continued her professional development with an internship at Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia, followed by a neurology residency at VA/UCLA. In 2002, Dr. Chilian completed a clinical neurophysiology fellowship at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine/VA Medical Center. ■
