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Spyridoula (Roula) Vasileiou
Instructor
Baylor College of Medicine
TX
USA
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Spyridoula Vasileiou, PhD, is an Instructor at the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy (CAGT) and in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine. Her scientific training is in immunology and since 2010 she has focused on the development of cellular therapies (dendritic cell- and T cell-based) to treat immunocompromised patients, such as patients with malignancies and post-transplant viral infections. In respect to cancer-directed T cell therapies, she has participated in the implementation of clinical trials targeting hematological and solid malignancies and has studied the in vivo effects of the infused T cells. With regard to virus-specific immunity, she has worked on the development of a multi-pathogen targeted T cell product with specificity for 4 community-acquired respiratory viruses (influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, human metapneumovirus and parainfluenza) that are commonly associated with severe respiratory tract infections in the immunocompromised. This work has been developed into a company-sponsored “first in man” clinical trial evaluating the safety and activity of these multivirus-specific T cells as an off-the-shelf therapy in hematopoietic stem cell and solid organ transplant recipients (NCT04933968, https://clinicaltrials.gov). Following the outbreak of COVID-19, she studied the evolution of cellular immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and focused on the immunological profiling of the virus with a view to developing a clinical trial for the prevention of severe disease in high-risk patients. Based on the results of this preclinical work, the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy initiated a company-sponsored proof-of-concept clinical trial that enrolled patients in the Texas Medical Center (NCT04401410, https://clinicaltrials.gov). She is a consultant with AlloVir and is the author of several high-impact scientific publications.