Elizabeth Jaffee

Elizabeth M. Jaffee is an American oncologist specializing in pancreatic cancer and immunotherapy.

Early life Jaffee was born in Brooklyn, New York, and her family moved to the neighborhood of Canarsie shortly after. When she was in middle school, the family moved to Huntington on Long Island. After residency she received a position as a research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh.

Career In 1989, Jaffee started at Johns Hopkins University as a Senior Clinical Oncology Fellow and then went on to become the Assistant Professor of Oncology in 1992. In 2019, she was appointed Chief Medical Advisor of the Lustgarten Foundation—the largest private-funder of pancreatic cancer research worldwide. Jaffee also serves as Director of the Foundation's Clinical Accelerator Initiative (CAI), which is designed to quickly move research from the lab to the clinic. She is also involved in the American Society for the Advancement of Science, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Association of Immunologists, the Society of Immunotherapy for Cancer, the Scientific Advisory Board of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Philadelphia, the External Advisory Boards of both the Seattle Cancer Consortium Breast SPORE and the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute Head and Neck Cancer SPORE.

Jaffee is the chair of the National Cancer Advisory Board for the National Cancer Institute, of which she has been a member since 2013, and co-chair of the NCI "Blue Ribbon Panel" for the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative. She is a leader of the Stand Up to Cancer Dream Team for pancreatic cancer.

Research Jaffee’s career is mostly focused on pancreatic cancer treatments. Her main point of interest is using immune therapies to help combat tolerance to cancers. Jaffee is a major leader in cancer vaccine therapy. According to the Boston Globe, Jaffee led a clinical trial on a vaccine, GVAX, that targets pancreatic tumors. With 3 out of the 14 patients in remission, Dr. Jaffee sees a lot of potential in this treatment style for the future. The vaccines would train the body’s immune cells to combat the cancer cells. If the vaccine is successful within a patient, it would prolong their life and prevent the pancreatic cancer from reoccurring for longer periods of time, therefore offering longer remission and a healthier lifestyle for the cancer patient.

Additionally, Dr. Jaffee has aided in many research discoveries for pancreatic cancer. For instance, genomic and proteomic methods were established to see new signs of pancreatic cancer progression.