About
Christian Ottensmeier graduated and began his training at the Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster, Germany. After a training fellowship in the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA, he moved to Southampton in 1994, where he completed his oncology training.
Following completion of his PhD on the molecular immunology of B-cells in the laboratory of Freda Stevenson, he became a Consultant in Medical Oncology at Southampton University Hospitals and Senior Lecturer at the University of Southampton in 2001.
In 2007 he was appointed to Chair in Experimental Cancer Medicine in Southampton and in 2019 to an Adjunct Professorship at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, CA, USA.
Christian joined the University of Liverpool and the Head and Neck Centre as Professor of Immuno-Oncology in August 2020. He was also appointed as Director of Clinical Research at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre in 2020.
Christian’s core interest is the understanding and improvement of immune responses in patients; his aim is to develop immunotherapies against solid cancers. His work focuses on three linked but distinct areas of: the study of cancer-specific immune responses in patients, development and validation of tests to measure these; the aim of both is to enable studies in patients to understand how immune responses to cancer can be improved for clinical benefit of patients.
During his time in Southampton, he set up and developed a research-focussed melanoma service, with a specialist interest in ocular melanoma.
In the last three years his focus has increasingly become immunology and immunotherapy of head and neck cancer and lung cancers; these will be his clinical focus in Liverpool.
Integrated with his clinical practice, he runs a laboratory programme examining the role and interplay of innate and adaptive immune cells in lung cancer and head and neck cancer. This work is underpinned by systematic tissue collection, to which ~2000 patients have be recruited since 2015. He has a keen interested in developing early phase immunotherapy trials.
He manages a broad portfolio of clinical trials in solid cancers; he has co-developed a number of national NCRI studies in melanoma and lung cancer.
He has served on a number of national and international peer review committees as well as on advisory boards and DSMBs for industry led studies. He is the early phase subspecialty lead on the CRN North West Coast Region, he is a member of EATI, the Cancer Vaccines Expert Working Group, the Scientific Strategy Committee for Breast Cancer Now and the Scientific Advisory Board for Cancer Research Malaysia. He is also a member of the editorial boards for the Journal of Immunotherapy of Cancer and the BSI Journal “Immunotherapy Advances”.