Our Team
CARLA GRANDORI MD, PhD
Cure First Founder and Scientific Director
A former research associate member at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (2009-2014), Dr. Carla Grandori has spent over 25 years studying the functions of cancer-causing genes and researching the vulnerabilities of cancer cells in the pursuit of more targeted and safer treatments for patients.
Dr. Grandori received an MD from the University of Rome, La Sapienza, Italy and a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from the Rockefeller University in New York. After a year at MIT’s Center for Cancer Reseach in Cambridge, MA, she came to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as a post-doctoral fellow in 1991. In 2006, Dr. Grandori joined Rosetta Inpharmatics, a subsidiary of Merck, to gain expertise in the cancer drug development process. This experience inspired Dr. Grandori to change her path and to begin applying her newly acquired knowledge of breakthrough technologies in functional genomics to"tackle” the MYC oncogene, previously considered “undruggable,” which had been the focus of her studies for several years. Using this approach, Dr. Grandori returned to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (2009-2014) where, in her lab, her team identified novel drug targets based on the concept of synthetic lethality for MYC-driven cancers including neuroblastoma and ovarian cancer. To read more about her published work see list of publications http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=carla+grandori.
In 2009, Dr. Grandori was asked to initiate and lead the Quellos High Throughput Screening (HTS) facility at the University of Washington, which enabled several investigators to adopt functional genomics and high-throughput drug screening in their work. In 2011, Dr. Grandori was recognized as a Presidential Entrepreneurial Fellow of the University of Washington for her work in establishing the HTS facility.
She is a Co-Investigator of the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Target Discovery and Development (CTD2) Network, and CEO of SEngine Precision Medicine.
Research Team
RACHELE ROSATI
Research Fellow
Rachele holds an MS in Cellular and Molecular Biology and a BS in Biology from the University of Florence, Italy, where she spent a year evaluating the migration capacity of murine satellite cells. She did research on abnormal proliferation in breast cancer at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center and spent two years working on drug target discovery for neuroblastoma tumors at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
Rachele has recently been establishing neuroblastoma PDX models in vitro and is presently in charge of the culture of different types of primary tumor cells.
REID SHAW - currently attending medical school
Research Fellow
Reid graduated from Whitman College in 2014 with a degree in Biophysics, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. Since graduation, he has been analyzing high-throughput drug screening data on patient-derived cells and working to identify novel drug targets for ovarian cancer.
FRANZ SCHAUB, PhD
Associate Director of Research (Volunteer)
A recipient of a Swiss National Science Foundation Advanced Postdoc Fellowship, Franz has more than 12 years of oncology research experience at University Hospital Basel, The Scripps Research Institute (Florida), and the Moffitt Cancer Center. He received his PhD in Genetics at the University of Basel. His current work focuses on target validation.