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Annie De Groot

Description

Dr. Annie De Groot is a physician and Research Professor of Biotechnology at the University of Rhode Island and co-founder and CEO/CSO of the immunoinformatics company EpiVax. She founded and directs the Institute for Immunology and Informatics at the University of Rhode Island, one of the first centers of excellence for immunoinformatics-driven vaccine design in the world. Dr. De Groot graduated from Smith College with a BA and from the Pritzker School of Medicine at University of Chicago. She completed her residency in internal medicine at Tufts New England Medical Center in 1986 and completed fellowships in Parasitology and Vaccine Research at the NIH (1989) and in Infectious Disease at the Tufts New England Medical Center (1993). While still an assistant professor at Brown University, Dr. De Groot and Bill Martin (COO/CIO EpiVax) co-founded EpiVax (1998) to use the immunoinformatics tools that De Groot had developed to design epitope-driven vaccines; services were then expanded to offer immunogenicity screening services for protein therapeutics in 2002. She led the team that discovered Tregitopes in 2008 and a new tool for predicting Treg epitopes, JanusMatrix. She is most excited about the relevance of this tool for the development of improved vaccines. In addition to her research on vaccines, Dr. De Groot has also contributed to the care of HIV-infected women inmates at the Yale HIV in Prison program and the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Framingham, and founded the GAIA Vaccine Foundation (in West Africa) for improving global AIDS treatment. De Groot is also volunteer medical director at Clinica Esperanza (Hope Clinic), a free clinic for Rhode Island residents who do not have health insurance.

ISV Fellow of the Month
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United States
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