Prof. Dr. Christian Blank Founder / Clinician

Christian Blank, Prof. Dr. Med, obtained his MD from the Medical School of the Technical University Munich, Germany, where he also completed his Doctoral thesis (summa cum laude) at the Department for Medical Microbiology and in 1997. He went on to attain the position of Physician at the Department of Haematology and Oncology, University of Regensburg, Germany (1998–2001). During 2001–2003, Dr Blank held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the lab of Professor Thomas Gajewski, University of Chicago, IL, USA. Subsequently he was appointed as Physician and Research Group Leader at the Department of Haematology and Oncology, University of Regensburg, Germany (2003–2007). Since 2007, he has been appointed Staff Member at the Department of Medical Oncology, and Group Leader at the Division of Immunology, The Netherlands Cancer Institute – Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital, Amsterdam.

He is a member of several prestigious societies, including ESMO and ASCO. Dr Blank has been an invited speaker at more than 120 national and international congresses and is the author of more than 100 publications. His research interests broadly include targeted and biological response modifiers in melanoma, prognostic markers in melanoma. He was the first to compare neo-adjuvant versus adjuvant checkpoint inhibition and is one of the leading experts in personalization of neo-adjuvant treatment. Together with Jennifer Wargo, MDA, Houston, and Georgina Long, MIA Sydney, he is the founder of the International Neo-adjuvant Melanoma Consortium (INMC).