Deputy Director of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center
Professor of Medicine
Lurie Family Professor of Oncology
Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University.
Dr. Platanias is originally from Athens, Greece and moved to the United States in 1984, after graduating from the University of Patras medical school. He initially worked at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a postdoctoral fellow in the Clinical Hematology Branch, researching the mechanisms of regulation of normal hematopoiesis bone marrow failure by cytokines. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, from 1986 until 1989. In 1989, he moved to Chicago as a clinical and research fellow in Hematology-Oncology at the University of Chicago. He worked there until 1992, and at that time he was introduced to the field of interferon and cytokine signaling.
He established his own laboratory working on cytokine signaling pathways in malignant cells in 1992 at Loyola University Chicago. From 1996 until 2002 he was at the University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC), initially as Associate Professor and subsequently as Professor and Chief of the Division of Hematology-Oncology. In 2002 he became Deputy Director of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University in Chicago and Professor of Medicine and Lurie Family Professor of Oncology at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University. Dr. Platanias’s laboratory was the first to describe the activation of several non-Stat signaling cascades that play critical roles in the generation of IFN-responses, including pathways involving the Vav proto-oncogene and Crk-proteins; the p38 Map kinase pathway and the mTOR signaling cascade.
Another aspect of his work is the therapeutic targeting of signaling cascades that promote leukemogenesis in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and over the years has identified several signaling pathways and effectors that are deregulated in leukemic cells. Dr. Platanias has served and/or chaired several study sections and committees at NIH, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense. He has served as President of the International Society of Interferon and Cytokine Research (ISICR) from 2010-2011.
Dr. Rathinam received his Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine from Madras Veterinary College, India and PhD from Michigan State University in 2009.
Dr. Sonnenberg completed his doctoral research training at the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine in 2011, focusing on mucosal immunology.
