Biography

Alex Snyder started her career as a federally-funded Principal Investigator at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she first began interacting with SITC. Since joining industry, Alex has held roles as Translational Medicine Lead at Adaptive Biotechnologies, Associate Vice President and Head of Translational Oncology at Merck and Principal at the biotech incubator Two River. Alex now serves as the Chief Medical Officer of Generate Biomedicines, a biotechnology company that uses machine learning and protein engineering to create novel medicines. Dr. Snyder co-chairs the SITC Biomarker Committee and represents SITC as a member of the Foundation for the NIH Biomarker Working Group. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at NYU and Bellevue Hospitals, Section Editor for the Journal for the ImmunoTherapy of Cancer (JITC), and a member of the board of Navigating Cancer.

Dr. Snyder received her medical degree and internal medicine training at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Mount Sinai Hospital, followed by medical oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC).

SITC Election Platform Statement

What are the two or three critical issues facing the field of cancer immunotherapy?

Over the past decade, checkpoint blockade immunotherapy has become a foundational component of the standard of care treatment of most solid and some liquid tumors. Cell therapy and immune cell engagers have also made great strides in liquid tumors. However, several substantial challenges in the areas of efficacy, safety and access still require addressing. First, how can immune-based therapeutic combinations bring benefit to a higher proportion of patients, including in disease contexts that have hitherto been resistant? Second, what clinical trial advances, including the use of surrogate endpoints and biomarkers, can accelerate the journey from scientific hypothesis to a change in standard of care? Third, access to care (both cancer care and supportive care for complications of novel therapies), still requires substantial improvement.

What is Your Vision for SITC?

One of SITC’s greatest strengths is bringing together key stakeholders—including members of academia, industry and regulators—to advance concepts that are critical to the field. This cross-functional approach has only become more urgent as immunotherapy advances beyond checkpoint blockade and into combinations. SITC should call upon its past experience to strategically define where to push the field; to remain relevant, we must do this in a manner that encompasses the increasingly diverse immunomodulatory mechanisms.

To most successfully apply our resources, first, I propose that, together with SITC’s current and past leadership, we evaluate past and ongoing programs and consider which have been most impactful. Second, we should apply those “lessons learned” to the questions outlined above (along with others brought by SITC members) to determine which issues SITC is best suited to lead and others where SITC’s voice should be represented in the setting of collaboration led by others. I hypothesize that SITC’s future impact would be best suited to pushing for advances in immunomodulatory therapies for unmet-need disease areas, but I would make sure to understand SITC leaders' views and the data on our past successes and failures before advancing this hypothesis.  

2023 SITC Election Homepage