Robert H. Vonderheide

Robert H. Vonderheide, MD, DPhil is Director of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, where he holds the John H. Glick Abramson Cancer Center Professorship and serves as Professor of Medicine. He is a leading figure in cancer immunology and the translation of novel immune-based therapies to clinical practice, with particular expertise in pancreatic cancer — widely considered among the most immunologically "cold" and treatment-refractory malignancies. Dr. Vonderheide has pioneered the use of CD40 agonist antibodies as a strategy to overcome the profoundly immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment of PDAC. His laboratory and clinical research demonstrated that systemic CD40 agonism activates macrophages to adopt a tumor-killing rather than tumor-promoting phenotype, enabling them to infiltrate and destroy pancreatic tumor stroma even in the absence of cytotoxic T cells — a paradigm-shifting finding showing that adaptive immunity is not the only entry point for immune-based PDAC therapy. His subsequent work has demonstrated that CD40 agonism combined with chemotherapy (gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel) and checkpoint blockade (anti-PD-1) can generate T cell responses against PDAC neoepitopes and produce objective responses in a subset of previously refractory patients. Dr. Vonderheide received his DPhil in Immunology from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar before completing his MD at Harvard Medical School. He has authored more than 200 publications and serves on the editorial boards of major oncology and immunology journals.