Rajkumar Savai

Prof. Savai is a professor and chair at the Institute for Lung Health (ILH) of Justus Liebig University (JLU) in Giessen, Germany, where he leads the research group “Lung Microenvironmental Niche in Cancerogenesis.” He is also heading the Oncology Basic Research Unit at Medical Clinic V of the University Hospital of Giessen and Marburg in Giessen. In addition, he is jointly appointed as a group leader at the Department of Lung Development and Remodeling at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim, Germany. Prof. Savai's aims to understand how the lung microenvironmental niche drives tumor initiation and progression and, most importantly, to identify specific targets that will interact with or inhibit the tumor niche's maintenance and functional competence. The long-term goal of Dr. Savai´s lab is to translate tumor microenvironment-based therapeutic approaches into proof-of-concept clinical trials in lung cancer. For the past several years, the Savai is interested in several aspects of lung cancer, especially in understanding and controlling immune/inflammatory/mesenchymal cells in the tumor microenvironment and delineating the roles of monocytes/macrophages, fibrocytes/fibroblasts, and T cell subpopulations in lung cancer progression and metastasis. He has published 122 research articles (Date: July 2023) in well-renowned scientific journals, including Nature Medicine, Science Translational Medicine, Science Advances, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Communications, EMBO Journal, Circulation, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Cancer Research, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, European Respiratory Journal and EMBO Molecular Medicine etc. Prof. Savai was born in Warangal, Telangana, India. After completing his Master's degree (MSc) in Biochemistry at Kakatiya University, Warangal, India, he moved to Germany and completed his PhD and postdoctoral training in the Department of Pneumology/Oncology at JLU. In 2010, he moved to the Max-Planck-Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim to lead an independent junior research group. In 2020, he was appointed to the Chair of Lung Microenvironmental Niche in Cancerogenesis at the Institute for Lung Health, in Giessen. He is a professor in the Heisenberg Program, which is awarded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to outstanding scientists. The scientific coordinator of the disease area lung cancer at the DZL is also member of the Executive Committee of the Thoracic Oncology Assembly of the American Thoracic Society (ATS), and co-spokesperson of the LOEWE consortium iCANx (Cancer-Lung [Disease] Crosstalk: Tumor and Organ Microenvironment). In 2018, he served as a visiting professor at the Earle A. Chiles Research Institute of the Robert W. Franz Cancer Center at Providence Portland Medical Center in Portland, Oregon, USA.