Ekaterina Belan, PhD
President and Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Ekaterina Belan founded Cell Gitik Inc. in December of 2013 based on her passionate commitment to advancing fundamental biomedical research that has the potential to strongly impact the curability of cancer and other diseases.
Dr. Belan’s background includes providing clinical genetics services in the Canadian health care system for over 6 years, conducting and leading biomedical research in an academic environment for 20 years, and performing analytical chemistry/spectroscopy work in an industrial setting for 1.5 years. With this combination of clinical, academic, and industrial experience, she directs research activities that transcend the boundaries between disciplines.
Ekaterina Belan received an MSc in Biology from Moscow State University in 1981 and a PhD in Cell Biology, Histology, and Embryology from the Institute of Human Morphology (IHM) in Moscow, Russia in 1992. After completion of post-doctoral research/training in 1993, Dr. Belan was promoted to Senior Researcher, a position in which she led several interinstitutional collaborative research projects. Her PhD and post-doctoral research produced seminal contributions to the field of experimental hematology. Specifically, Dr. Belan showed that peritoneal exudate macrophages and T-lymphocytes constitute an important regulatory system that is involved in the triggering of stress erythropoiesis in response to high-volume blood loss. Prior to her time at IHM, Dr. Belan’s research was in the field of immunopharmacology and biological trials of chemical compounds.
In 2007, Dr. Belan shifted the focus of her career to medical genetics. She completed a post-degree certification program in Clinical Genetics at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT; Burnaby, Canada) and two internships (in clinical molecular genetics and clinical cytogenetics) in 2008. From 2009 to 2014, she worked at the Royal University Hospital (Saskatoon, Canada) where her main focus was cancer genetics services for patients with hematological and lymphoid cancers. Since 2010, Dr. Belan has been working on a research project aimed at unraveling the fundamental mechanism that governs an undifferentiated state of a cell. Her efforts in this direction have laid the groundwork for an entirely new approach that has the potential to transform the field of cancer treatment.