Dirk Jäger studied medicine at the Universities in Lübeck and Freiburg and received his MD degree in 1991. He specialized in the field of internal medicine and received his venia legendy at the University of Mainz in 2003. From 1998 to 2000 Dirk propeled his scientific career with a research grant from Cornell Medical Center, New York performing research in the Tumor Immunology Group of Yao Chen and Lloyd Old, Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. 2001 to 2003 he was head of the SEREX research group at the Krankenhaus Nordwest in Frankfurt/Main. Thereafter, Dirk headed the Tumor Immunology Laboratory at the Oncology Department, University Hospital Zurich from 2003 to 2005. Since 2005 Dirk is Managing Director of the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg, as well as Medical Director of the Medical Oncology Department at the Heidelberg University Hospital (UKHD). In addition, he is Head of the Clinical Cooperation Unit “Applied Tumor-Immunity” at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) since 2014. At NCT Heidelberg, he is responsible for all patient care programs and counseling services. His research focusses on immuno-oncology and the development of advanced methods and drugs to characterize and manipulate tumor-host interactions, in particular via modulation of the tumor environment. He could show that combinatorial immunotherapies can elicit clinical responses in otherwise non-responsive tumors. Further, his team engages in developing cellular therapies, bispecific antibodies, and computational tumor immunology.

Dirk has set up strategic alliances with several public institutions as well as with industry. He is involved in over 100 clinical trials, and builds on this foundation to further advance personalized cancer immunotherapy as innovative treatment concepts.

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