New study directors at Jackson Laboratory—West
JAX® NOTES Issue 511, Fall 208
Two new study directors recently joined the JAX® In Vivo Services team at our California facility.
Sandra Biroc, Ph.D., joins JAX® In Vivo Services as a Study Director. Previously, Dr. Biroc investigated the xenograft efficacy of novel targeted therapies in solid tumors at Berlex Biosciences, In Vivo Pharmacology. She specialized in orthotopic and metastatic mouse models supporting small molecule inhibitor, antibody-based, and viral-delivered gene therapy. She performed pharmacokinetics, maximum tolerated dose, pharmacodynamic, efficacy, radio-immunotherapy, biodistribution, and imaging studies. Before her work at Berlex, Dr. Biroc was at Axys Pharmaceuticals investigating small molecule protease inhibitors with in vitro, in vivo, and ex vivo models of angiogenesis, osteoporosis, asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis. She was also a founding member of Khepri Pharmaceuticals (SSF), a raw biotechnology start-up based on proteases and protease inhibitors. There, she developed assays for neutral endopeptidase and cysteine protease inhibitors for rheumatoid arthritis and cancer disease indications. She received her B.S. degree from California State University Northridge and her Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University.
Pali Kaur, Ph.D., joins JAX® In Vivo Services as an Associate Study Director. Previously, Dr. Kaur was involved in developing models of neurodegenerative diseases, especially demyelinating disorders such as multiple sclerosis, at the Institute of Pediatric Regenerative Medicine. There, she developed in vivo models of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) in PARP-KO mice. Dr. Kaur was instrumental in starting a project to develop pluripotent stem cells from somatic cells manipulated to differentiate into myelin-producing cells. She was also a research assistant professor at Temple University School of Medicine, where she worked in molecular genetics and cancer research. There, she identified and isolated many tumor suppressor genes and studied their expression patterns in several tumors. She earned her Ph.D. from Punjab Agricultural University in India and her M.B.A. from Fox School of Business and Management.
