Jessica Kandel is the Mary Campau Ryerson Professor of Surgery and the Vice-Chair for Academic Affairs in the Department of Surgery at the University of Chicago.
Kandel graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1981, and completed her MD degree at Columbia University in 1985. She then went on to a General Surgery residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston (1986–1993). During her residency, Kandel completed a two-year surgical research fellowship with Dr. Judah Folkman at the Boston Children's Hospital, investigating mechanisms of tumor angiogenesis (new blood vessel development that "feeds" tumors).
Kandel joined Columbia University in 1995, becoming the Director of the Charles Edison Laboratory for Pediatric Surgical Research in 2000 and, in 2001, co-organized the first Columbia University Arden House Symposium on Angiogenesis. Kandel was a founding member of the Vascular Anomalies Group at Columbia, a multidisciplinary team treating children with vascular malformations, hemangioma, lymphatic tumors, and other disorders of vessel development. She was named the R. Peter Altman Chair in Pediatric Surgery at Columbia University in 2009, as a Professor of Surgery & Pediatrics in the Institute of Cancer Genetics at Columbia University.
In 1998, Kandel, Darrell Yamashiro, and colleagues at the Pediatric Tumor Biology Laboratory were the first to describe the way experimental pediatric tumor growth could be suppressed by blocking a molecule called vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) from performing its natural job. Their laboratory research provided key preclinical data about an antibody to VEGF, which was later humanized to become bevacizumab (Avastin, Genentech). Approved by the FDA in 2004 for adults with colorectal cancer, bevacizumab is now gaining use in the treatment of multiple adult and pediatric tumors.
Her current focus in the laboratory is to understand how tumors adapt to blockade of VEGF. Understanding how tumors become resistant to therapies that target recruited host cells may play an important role in the development of therapies for children with resistant cancers such as neuroblastoma, Wilms tumor, and hepatoblastoma.
Kandel has developed a novel mouse model of lymphatic malformations, with her coinvestigator, Carrie Shawber.