Paraskevi Giannakakou is an Associate Professor of Pharmacology in Medicine in the Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University in New York. Her research is focused on a deeper understanding and improvement of the clinical action of anticancer drugs.

Together with her team, Dr. Giannakakou works on developing microfluidic devices that specifically capture CTCs from metastatic prostate or breast cancer patients. Her ultimate goal is to utilize these devices to capture and molecularly analyze tumor derived CTCs using a simple, non-invasive blood draw to determine the best treatment for each patient based on the molecular make-up of their tumor cells.

She studied Pharmacology at the Athens University Medical School and later continued her studies at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda.

Dr. Giannakakou became Assistant Professor of Hematology and Medical Oncology at the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University in 2000 and was recruited to WCMC in 2005.

Her research is focused on the biology of the microtubule cytoskeleton in cancer and the mechanism of action of antitumor drugs that target microtubules and are used in cancer chemotherapy.

More specifically, her research tries to identify the intracellular trafficking and signaling pathways that require an intact and dynamic microtubule network as well as the little-understood functional consequences of drug-induced microtubule disruption and cell death.