Biography
Dr Erik Wennerberg obtained his MSc in Biomedicine from Uppsala University in 2008 and continued his doctoral studies at the Department of Oncology-Pathology at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. In 2014, he defended his PhD thesis on the cytotoxicity and migration of natural killer cells in cancer.
Dr Wennerberg’s postdoctoral research at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York was focused on how radiation-induced alterations of the tumor microenvironment regulate anti-tumor immune responses. He received a Breakthrough fellowship award from the United States Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program to study the immunomodulatory role of extracellular metabolites in irradiated breast tumors.
In 2020, Dr Wennerberg joined the Division of Radiotherapy and Imaging at The Institute of Cancer Research where his research is focused on studying mechanisms of tumor immune resistance.
His group investigates how solid tumors shape their microenvironment to evade the immune system by generating suppressive barriers and subverting immune homeostatic mechanisms.
They aim to discern how radiotherapy tilts the balance of these processes with the goal of identifying pathways and biomarkers that predict response to radiotherapy/immunotherapy as well as finding actionable markers that can be targeted in novel combination treatments for advanced cancers.
When he is not at work, Dr Wennerberg plays percussion in a samba group.