Emma Shtivelman is a molecular and cell biologist with extensive experience in cancer biology. She has in-depth understanding of cancer signal transduction and metabolism, cancer models in vitro and in vivo, target and drug discovery and validation, assay development, and preclinical research. She has technical expertise in numerous modern methodologies employed to understand the molecular basis of human malignancies and advance preclinical and clinical research.
Emma received her PhD in molecular biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science where she identified the fused transcript between two cellular genes, BCR and ABL in chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), the first demonstration of an oncogenic gene product derived from a chromosomal translocation. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), she characterized the molecular consequences of chromosomal translocations in Burkitt lymphoma and identified gene products relevant to the pathogenesis of neuroblastoma. She worked at SyStemix on establishing a novel SCID-hu metastasis model to enable the in vivo analysis of human tumor metastasis. She continued her research activity at the UCSF Cancer Center analyzing deregulation of signal transduction pathways in human cancer and the molecular underpinnings of metastatic progression. Before joining Cancer Commons, Emma worked at BioNovo, Inc., researching new drugs that selectively disrupt metabolism of breast and pancreatic cancers by targeting their metabolic preferences.