Vivek Subbiah

Dr. Vivek Subbiah, M.D., is an associate professor in the Investigational Cancer Therapeutics department (a Phase 1 program). He is the Center Clinical Medical Director of the Clinical Center for Targeted Therapy, Cancer Medicine division, at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

After completing his medical school in India at Sri Ramachandra Medical College and Research Institute, India he completed a combined residency in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University, MetroHealth, Cleveland Ohio. Dr. Subbiah has a unique training background as he is one of the few physicians in the nation/world to have training in oncology in both adults and children. He is board certified in both Internal Medicine and Pediatrics and has completed fellowships in both adult and pediatric oncology at MD Anderson.

Dr. Vivek Subbiah is a clinical trialist and Physician Investigator in the Department of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics at MD Anderson, which is the largest oncology drug development unit in the world. He is primarily involved in translational cancer research and the design and conduct of early-phase biomarker-driven clinical trials, with a specialist interest in anti-body drug conjugates, radio-pharmaceuticals, immunoconjugates and basket trials. Dr. Subbiah serves as the Principal Investigator in numerous trials, certainly leaving an accomplished impression on the national and international drug development community. Dr. Subbiah has skillfully led the MD Anderson effort on the international Vemurafenib Basket Trial in non-melanoma BRAF V600-mutated cancers, which pioneered a novel histology-independent clinical trial design. Vemurafenib was FDA approved in Erdheim-Chester disease based on this trial. Dabrafenib and trametinib was U.S. FDA-approved in the treatment of BRAF V600-mutant anaplastic thyroid cancer (ATC) based on practice changing data from the Rare Oncology Agnostic Approach (ROAR) trial lead by Dr. Subbiah. Furthermore, his novel investigator-initiated trials have also laid the foundation for therapeutic breakthroughs for additional rare cancers. Specifically, his clinical trial for Radium-223 as a treatment for relapsed osteosarcoma was singularly responsible for the inclusion of this radiopharmaceutical in the treatment algorithm of osteosarcoma in the guidelines of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN).

Dr. Subbiah is a major advocate for precision oncology. His national leadership roles continue to expand as the National PI for the BRAF non-V600 alteration arm of the NCI-MATCH Precision Medicine Clinical Trial. His trial portfolio includes trials that target BRAF, MEK, RET, CDK, WNT, VEGF,mTOR, EZH2-EED pathways, novel immunotherapy combination trials GITR, TLR7/9, PD1, WT1, several first-in-human antibody drug conjugates, oncolytic viruses, intra-tumoral therapies and radiopharmaceuticals. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed in several prestigious journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Clinical Oncology, JAMA Oncology, Cancer Discovery, Clinical Cancer Research, and Lancet Oncology.

Louis M. Staudt

Dr. Louis M. Staudt graduated from Harvard College and earned his M.D.-Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Following Internal Medicine training, he joined Nobel Laureate David Baltimore's laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow. His laboratory in the National Cancer Institute focuses on the molecular basis for human lymphoid malignancies and the development of targeted therapies for these cancers.

Dr. Staudt is Chief of the Lymphoid Malignancies Branch and Director of the NCI Center for Cancer Genomics, which directs large-scale programs studying genomic aberrations and function in cancer. His numerous awards include election to the National Academy of Sciences.

René Bernards

Prof. René Bernards, PhD is a professor of molecular carcinogenesis at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. His laboratory uses functional genomic approaches to find vulnerabilities of cancers that can be exploited therapeutically. Using the concept of synthetic lethality, his laboratory searches for combinations of drugs that are lethal for cancer cells and for vulnerabilities of cancer cells of a defined genotype.

Andrea Califano

Dr. Andrea Califano, PhD is the Clyde and Helen Wu professor of Systems Biology and the founding Chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University. He was originally trained as a physicist and has applied physics-based approaches, including extensive use of information theory principles, to the reverse engineering and interrogation of gene regulatory networks.

He pioneered the use of mammalian networks as models for the quantitative analysis of cancer related phenotypes and for the identification of driver genes, driver mutations, and small-molecule modulators of tumor vulnerabilities. In particular, he has demonstrated (a) that tumor specific transcriptional and signaling networks can be inferred accurately using information theoretic principles from large collections of molecular profile data of patient-derived tumor samples, using algorithms developed by his lab such as ARACNe; (b) That these networks can be interrogated using tumor derived signatures to discover master regulators of tumor progression and drug sensitivity; (c) that computational analysis of de novo inferred networks, upstream of such master regulators, can systematically elucidate the repertoire of genetic alterations and germline variants responsible for their aberrant disease activity. Finally, (d) his lab has shown that inhibition of master regulators using individual compounds or synergistic compound combinations, as computationally inferred from perturbational signatures, can abrogate tumor viability in vitro and in vivo. Since master regulators can be performed on an individual gene expression profile basis, this methodological approach is uniquely suited to the dissection of tumor mechanism heterogeneity, either from individual patient samples or even from single cells.

Furthermore, predictions from these methods have been used as a rationale for several clinical studies, including on the use of combination therapy in relapsed HER2+ breast cancer following trastuzumab therapy as well as in several N of 1 studies, where tumor vulnerabilities (i.e., master regulators) are identified and targeted pharmacologically on an individual patient basis. Thus, taken together, these methodologies are poised to provide an extremely valuable and complementary approach to current attempts to dissect heterogeneity of tumor drug response and to identify proteins that can be targeted pharmacologically to rescue drug sensitivity.

Richard L. Schilsky

Dr. Richard L. Schilsky earned his M.D. at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine in 1975. Following a residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Parkland Memorial Hospital, he received training in Medical Oncology and Clinical Pharmacology at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) from 1977 to 1981. Dr. Schilsky returned to the University of Chicago in 1984 where he rose to the rank of Professor of Medicine (tenured) and served as Director of the University of Chicago Cancer Research Center (1991-99), as Associate Dean for Clinical Research (1999-2007) and as Chief of the Section of Hematology-Oncology (2009-2012). An international expert in gastrointestinal malignancies and cancer pharmacology Dr. Schilsky served as Chairman of the Cancer and Leukemia Group B, an NCI-sponsored national cancer clinical trials group from 1995-2010.

Dr. Schilsky has served on a number of peer review and advisory committees for the National Cancer Institute (NCI) including as a member and chair of the NCI Board of Scientific Advisors and as a member of the Clinical and Translational Research Advisory Committee. He has also served as a member and chair of the Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee of the Food and Drug Administration. He presently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA, a member of the Board of Directors of Friends of Cancer Research and as a member of the National Cancer Policy Forum of the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Schilsky has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), ASCO President 2008-2009 and ASCO Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer(2013-2021).

Dr. Schilsky is Chairman of the WIN Consortium.

Solange Peters

Prof. Solange Peters, MD-PhD, achieved her MD from the Medical School at the University of Lausanne in 1998, following this she attended the Microbiology Institute at the University of Lausanne until 2002, concluding with a MD-PhD thesis on new HIV drug-resistance mechanisms.

From 2002-2006, Prof. Peters did her residency in Internal Medicine, followed by a Fellowship at the Multidisciplinary Oncology Centre at the University Hospital of Lausanne. In September 2006, she sat the ESMO Examination in Oncology and was awarded the ESMO Best European Exam result. This was shortly followed by the SSMO (Swiss Society of Medical Oncology) oral exam November 2006. In 2013, Prof. Peters received the title of Lausanne University Private Docent (PD-MER) and was appointed Professor and Head of Medical Oncology at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine in Lausanne successively in 2015 and 2016.

Prof. Peters is currently in charge of teaching and patient care in the area of medical oncology and thoracic malignancies at the Department of Oncology of Lausanne University, where she is building a translational programme in collaboration with the molecular oncology laboratories of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and the Ludwig Institute.

Prof. Peters’ main field of interest is new biomarker discovery and validation in preclinical and clinical settings. She is also strongly involved and interested in multimodality trial building for locally-advanced NSCLC as well as clinical and translational cancer immunotherapy. Her current research projects as a chair are focused on multimodality curative-intent treatment of stage III NSCLC, combined immunotherapy for the treatment of NSCLC, SCLC, thymic malignancies and mesothelioma, as well as targeted therapies in oncogene-addicted NSCLC. She acts as the local PI of lung trials opened in Lausanne Cancer Centre, focused on phase I, predictive biomarkers and NSCLC immunotherapy. In addition, she is a co-PI of several other trials.

She is active in academic trials building and organisation, as well as related databases for the ETOP (European Thoracic Oncology Platform), where she is responsible for communication, scientific coordination and member of the Foundation Council.

Prof. Solange Peters is an active member of the educational programme within ESMO. Prof. Peters is currently President (2020 – 2022) of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) and a member of the ESMO Faculty for Lung and Other Thoracic Cancers. She was previously Chair of the ESMO Women for Oncology Committee, member of the ESMO E-Learning and CME Committee, elected ESMO Swiss National Representative, and was also Subject Editor for the ESMO Guidelines Working Group. She was the scientific chair of ELCC 2016 and Scientific Chair of the ESMO 2018 annual congress in Munich.

She is in parallel active in IASLC and served as a Board Member. She is a member of AACR (American Association for Cancer Research) and EORTC (European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer).

Of national organisations, Prof. Peters is Vice President of SAMO (Swiss Academy for Multidisciplinary Oncology), member of SAKK (Swiss Group for Clinical Cancer Research) – where she was Co-Chair of the Swiss Lung Cancer Research Group from 2010-2019, FMH (Association of Swiss Physicians) and ASMAC/VSAO (Association of Swiss Interns and Residents) and was the president of FOROME (Association Romande pour la formation continue en oncologie médicale) for 5 years.

Prof. Peters has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed manuscripts and book chapters, served as an Associate Editor of ‘Lung Cancer’ and was the Deputy Editor of the ‘Journal of Thoracic Oncology’ (JTO), the official journal of IASLC, until 2020. She was Editor in Chief of Cancer Treatment Communications. In addition, she acts as Associate Editor for Annals of Oncology, Associate Editor for ‘Frontiers in Pharmacology of Anti-Cancer Drugs’ and Review Editor for ‘Frontiers in Thoracic Oncology’. She is the author of numerous articles in peer-reviewed publications as well as book chapters and abstracts and the Co-Editor of the book ‘Perspectives in Thoracic Oncology’ (UNI-MED), the book series ‘Progress in Tumor Research’ (Karger) as well as new therapeutic strategies in lung cancers (Springer).

Martine Piccart

Prof. Martine Piccart, MD, PhD, is a professor of oncology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and director of medicine at the Institute Jules Bordet, in Brussels, Belgium. Earning her medical degrees at ULB and oncology qualifications in New York and London, she is also a member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine.

With a primary interest in breast cancer and drug development, Prof. Piccart is a leader in international research collaboration and is the principal or co-principal investigator of many clinical trials, including HERA, MINDACT, and ALTTO. She is co-founder and chair of the Breast International Group (BIG), uniting 49 academic research groups from around the world and running over 30 trials under its umbrella. BIG’s research programs include the European Commission supported TRANSBIG consortium of 28 institutions in 11 countries (collaborating with the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer [EORTC] the MINDACT trial), and NeoBIG, an innovative biomarker and drug development program focused on neoadjuvant trials.

Prof. Piccart is active in numerous professional organizations. She is the immediate past president of the European CanCer Organisation (ECCO, 2014-2015). She has also held presidencies of the European Organisation for the Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) and the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), and has served on the American Society of Clinical Oncology Board (ASCO). Throughout her career, Prof. Piccart has been honored with numerous prestigious awards for her research contributions, including the Jill Rose Award for distinguished biomedical research (2009, New York, USA), the William L. McGuire Award in recognition of her contribution in breast cancer research (2009, SABCS, San Antonio/Texas, USA), the Umberto Veronesi Award for the Future Fight Against Cancer (2012, Cancun, Mexico), the David A. Karnofsky Memorial Award in recognition of innovative clinical research and developments that have changed the way oncologists think about the general practice of oncology (2013, ASCO, Chicago, USA) and, most recently, the Susan G. Komen’s Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction (2015, SABCS, San Antonio/Texas, USA).

An accomplished clinician and scientist, Prof. Piccart is author or co-author of over 500 publications in peer-reviewed journals.

Sabine Tejpar

Prof. Sabine Tejpar, Ph.D. serves as an Associate Professor in the Dept of Gastro Enterology, Digestive Oncology Unit, UZ Leuven. Prof. Tejpar works as a part time clinician, part time researcher (Senior Clinical Investigator of the Fund for Scientific Research- Flanders (Belgium)), with a focus on basic and translational research in colorectal cancer.

Prof. Tejpar's main research projects involve prognostic markers in adjuvant colorectal cancer and predictive markers for efficacy of EGFR inhibition. Prof. Tejpar has published over fifty peer-reviewed publications and is a member of the EORTC, active in Board Gastrointestinal Group; member of the EORTC PAMM and Laboratory Research Division and Co-Chair of the EORTC-NCI-ASCO tutorial sessions. She is a member of advisory board of several pharmaceutical companies in relation to new drug development and translational research in gastrointestinal cancer.

Prof. Tejpar is trained in Internal medicine and Gastro Enterology and holds a Ph.D in the program of Molecular Oncology at the Center for Human Genetics, KULeuven.

John Quakenbush

Prof. John Quackenbush is Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Professor in the Channing Division of Network Medicine, and Professor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

John’s PhD was in Theoretical Physics, but in 1992 he received a fellowship to work on the Human Genome Project. This led him through the Salk Institute, Stanford, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), and to Harvard in 2005. John uses massive data to probe how many small effects combine to influence human health and disease.

He has more than 300 scientific papers and over 73,000 citations. Among his honors is recognition in 2013 as a White House Open Science Champion of Change.

Vladimir Lazar

Dr. Vladimir Lazar obtained his MD (1989) at The University of Timisoara (Romania), First Class and Certificate of Merit. He became a Specialist in Medical Clinical Biology and obtained his PhD in molecular biology (1997) at The University René Descartes in Paris, with the highest degree and the Prize of University. He was the Head of Gustave Roussy’s Genomic Center and Integrated Biology Platform (2002-2015); Dr Vladimir Lazar, M.D, Ph.D. is specialized in clinical biology, molecular biology, molecular pathology and has a broad training, education and postgraduate degrees in biotechnology (first in class) and project management.

He is author of 8 patents and author-co-author of more than 100 publications. He is the Founder of the WIN Consortium and is the Chief Scientific and Operating officer.

Eytan Ruppin

Dr. Eytan Ruppin, MD and PhD (Computer Science) has served as a professor of Computer Science & Medicine at Tel-Aviv University (Israel) and Director of the University of Maryland Computational and Bioinformatics Center, before joining the NCI as the Chief of its newly established Cancer Data Science Lab.

His research focuses on developing and harnessing novel computational systems biology approaches, first in computational neuroscience and in recent years, on the multi-omics analysis of cancer. He collaborates with many experimental cancer labs, aiming to utilize computational approaches to jointly gain a network-level integrative view of the systems we study, and predict and test novel drug targets and biomarkers to treat cancer more selectively and effectively.

His lab has identified the first metabolic synthetic lethal (SL) drug target to treat cancer in a joint experimental/computational effort [1] and has been the first to identify SL networks in cancer in a genome-wide manner from TCGA analysis [2]. Together with his experimental collaborators, they have developed a new approach for stratifying patients for immunotherapy treatment [3] and discovered a fundamental link between urea cycle dysregulation, mutational bias and response to immunotherapy [4]. His main focus in recent years have been on developing a new approach for SL-based precision-based cancer therapy [5], which is now moving into clinical prospective testing.

Olivier Elemento

Dr. Olivier Elemento, PhD is a professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) and Cornell University. Since 2017, he has been Director of the Caryl and Israel Englander Institute for Precision Medicine, a multidisciplinary institute that draws on more than 100 faculty members from nearly all basic and clinical departments at Cornell University. Its mission is to use genomics, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies to develop and bring highly personalized medicine to patients at WCM’s affiliated hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital (NYPH), and elsewhere. The institute also fosters patient-centered basic and clinical research in the areas of genomics, systems biology, AI and data science.

Olivier Elemento is funded by numerous NIH grants, foundation grants, NIH contracts and industry alliances. He has published more than 330 articles in the areas of precision medicine, genomics, computational biology, AI, systems biology and drug discovery. He has led the development of novel clinical genomics assays, including whole-exome sequencing offered to patients at WCM and NYPH, and is currently leading a large multidisease effort to bring whole-genome sequencing into clinical practice at WCM and NYPH. He co-founded two venture capital-funded companies: Volastra Therapeutics (with Lew Cantley and Sam Bakhoum) and OneThree Biotech (with Neel Madhukar). He serves on the scientific advisory boards of Volastra, OneThree Biotech, Owkin, Freenome and several other companies.

Josep Tabernero

Dr. Josep Tabernero holds MD and PhD degrees from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. He is currently the Head of the Medical Oncology Department at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona and the Director of the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology. He is highly involved in translational research and pharmacodynamic phase I studies with molecular targeted therapies. He is especially devoted to phase I and II studies with pharmacodynamic endpoints with novel agents directed to the membrane receptors, such as the EGFR-family and IGF-1R, the PI3K and ERK signalling pathways, as well as downstream cytoplasmatic and intranucleous effectors including Mdm2/p53 and aurora kinase. Based on the idea that each tumor has an independent genetic identity, his own research group, Gastrointestinal & Endocrine Tumors, actively participates in the development of molecular therapies targeting specific oncoproteins, aimed at developing personalized therapies (e.g. against EGFR, HER2, BRAF, MEK, PI3K, Akt, mTOR or IGF1-R among others) for those patients displaying genetic lesions or pathway disregulation. One of group´s key goals is to identify new predictive markers of response to diverse treatments and unmask markers of primary resistance (de novo) and secondary treatment. At preclinical level, his group is involved in developing new xenograft models with explant tumors from patients (“xenopatients”) in mice in order to mimic the patient’s disease and study tumor development in optimized research models. It also leads a program devoted to the study of circulating biomarkers (detection and genotyping of circulating free DNA).

He is past President of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)(2018 – 2019) and an Executive Board Member. He is also member of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), and has been appointed as member of several Educational and Scientific Committees of ESMO, ECCO, ASCO, AACR, AACR/NCI/EORTC, ASCO Gastrointestinal, and WCGIC meetings.

Dr. Tabernero is Vice-Chairman of the WIN Consortium and Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB).

Jean-François Martini

Jean-François Martini has biotech and pharma industry experience in pharmacology and clinical translational sciences and is author/coauthor of over 50 scientific publications. He is currently Executive Director, Translational Oncology, Global Product Development-Oncology and has been at Pfizer, in La Jolla, California, for the past 10 years. He was previously Sr. Director, Translational Medicine, at Exelixis, So San Francisco, California, where he contributed to the approval of cobimetinib and cabozantinib, and to projects such as the alliance with Sanofi for the PI3K programs and out-licensing of esaxerenone to Daiichi Sankyo.

He completed his postdoctoral training at University of California, San Francisco, where he studied the antiangiogenic properties of fragments of Prolactin and Growth Hormone, after obtaining a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from University of Paris XI, France. At Pfizer, he currently leads and/or supports the translational strategy for the cell cycle modulators (CDK inhibitors); the Renal Cell Cancer franchise (sunitinib, axitnib); and lorlatinib (ALK/ROS1 inhibitors) in Lung Cancer. He also leads the cross functional efforts in the area of liquid biopsy/cfDNA (represents Pfizer as part of Blood Profiling Atlas-Cancer; Friends of Cancer Research) and is the Pfizer board of director representative for the WIN consortium.

Ilhan Celik

Prof. Ilhan Celik is Vice President, Global Program Leadership for Oncology at Healthcare Business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. He has an extensive (>25 years) academic & industry background in basic and clinical research/development, oncology, immunology, early and late drug development/strategy development, precision medicine and CDx development.

He received his MD at the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany in 1996.

He joined Merck KGaA in March 2006 and held roles of increasing responsibilities including Global Head of Biomarker Development Oncology and Global Head of Clinical Biomarker Strategy Oncology. In these roles, he was responsible for the oncology pipeline biomarker strategy. He was instrumental for the Erbitux KRAS strategy enabling the expansion into 1st line.

Prior to Merck KGaA, he worked as a surgeon, scientist and group leader/lecturer for surgical/oncological research & development. He was Associate Professor and deputy department head at the Philipps University Marburg until 2006. Since 2006 he is Full Professor of Experimental Medicine/Surgery and Oncological Research at the Philipps University Marburg.

Since 2017, he is accountable for the Tepotinib Program at Merck Healthcare KGaA with recent line-agnostic approvals in Japan (2020) and US, Canada, Switzerland, UK, Taiwan in 2021. He is author/co-author of > 150 peer-reviewed articles in high impact journals, reviews & book chapters.

Haiquan Chen

Prof. Haiquan Chen, Professor & Chairman, Department of Thoracic Surgery, Team Leader, Thoracic Oncology MDT, Director, Lung Cancer Center, Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center.

International Academic Association: Active Member of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS)(2011- ) ,Member of the Membership Committee (AATS) (2016-2017) , AATS Focus Faculty (2013-2016), AATS Focus on Thoracic Surgery: CHINA 2016 Co-Chair and AATS 2016 Annual Meeting General Thoracic Skill Co-Chair, Member of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) (2004- ), Member of the Workforce on International Relationships (STS)(2011-2013, 2014-2016), International Member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) (2016-2019), Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians (FCCP), Member of the European Society of Thoracic Surgeons (ESTS) (2015-), Council Member of Asian Society for Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery (ASCVTS) (2016-). Vice Chairman, Chinese Association of Thoracic Surgeons; Vice Chief Committee Member, Shanghai Association of Cardiothoracic Surgery; Chief Committee Member, Thoracic Oncology Committee of Shanghai Anticancer Society.

Vice Chief Editor: Journal of Cancer Research, Clinical Oncology.

Editorial Board member: Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Journal of Cancer Research and Clinical Oncology, Journal of Thoracic Disease, American Journal of Translational Research.

Prof. Chen has gained a lot of financial support from NSFC and Shanghai Science and Technology Committee program. In last 5 years, over 150 articles were published in peer-review academic journal like Cancer Cell, JCO, CCR, ANN SURG, Cancer, JTCVS, ANN THORAC SURG. In addition, three novel methods for detecting fusion genes have gained national patent of invention. In 2012, Prof. Chen was awarded Shanghai Outstanding Academic Leader, after sequential awards from the science and technology prize of CACA (rank 1)，Shanghai Science and Technology Development Prize (rank1,2,3), Huaxia Medical Science and Technology Prize(rank 1), Chinese Medical Science and Technology Prize(rank 1), Military Medical Achievements Prize (rank 1), Shanghai Medical Science and Technology Prize (rank 2)，The third national famous doctor "outstanding building title.

Research Focus: Translational research of molecular and biological markers in lung cancer

Enriqueta Felip

Dr. Enriqueta Felip, MD PhD is currently clinical chief at the Medical Oncology Department and associate professor of medicine at the Autonomous University School of Medicine in Barcelona. She received her medical degree from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where she also completed her PhD in medical oncology.

Dr Felip is in charge of thoracic malignancy management, and is responsible for thoracic cancer trials undertaken by the Oncology Department. She is currently a member of the Spanish Lung Cancer Group (SLCG), the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO), the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) and the National Lung Cancer Partnership.

In 2019, Dr. Enriqueta Felip has been elected as vice president of SEOM (Spanish Society of Medical Oncology). Currently, she is the coordinator of the lung cancer programme of the European School of Oncology (ESO) and member of the board of directors of IASLC. Dr. Felip was listed as Global Highly Cited Researcher for 2018 and 2019 by the Web of Science Group.

Jair Bar

Dr. Jair Bar, MD., PhD. Deputy Director, Cancer Center, and the Head of the Thoracic Oncology Unit, Sheba Medical Center. Dr. Bar has started his specialization in Oncology (Chemotherapy and Radiotherapy) at the Sheba Medical Center, then he was a clinical fellow in Thoracic Oncology at The Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre.

Dr. Bar is the recipient of the Dr. Lawrence Kline/Ms. Sherry Merkis Award. He was a part of the initiative group to establish the Israel Lung Cancer Group (ILCG), and is a Chair of ILCG since 2003. Dr. Bar is also a member of ISCORT, ASCO and AACR.

He is an author of numerous articles and chapters in medical literature.

Benjamin Solomon

Dr. Benjamin Solomon, M.D, is a medical oncologist and at Avera Cancer Institute, in Sioux Falls, SD.

Dr. Solomon holds two administrative directorships as the Medical Information Officer and the Oncology Clinical Research Officer at Avera. He graduated from University of Nebraska Medical Center prior to completing residency in internal medicine and fellowship in medical oncology and hematology at Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, MN. His clinical practice focuses on diagnosis and management of patients with solid tumors.

Dr. Solomon’s current research focuses on applied precision oncology approaches to the treatment of lung cancer.

Fiona Blackhall

Dr Fiona Blackhall was educated at St Andrews and Manchester Universities. She began Medical Oncology training at The Christie in 1995 and was awarded a four-year Cancer Research Campaign Research PhD Fellowship for a Clinician in 1997 at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research, Manchester.

Following her PhD she undertook a postdoctoral and clinical fellowship in the field of lung cancer and translational research at Princess Margaret Hospital, University of Toronto and Ontario Cancer Institute, Canada. She returned to the UK in 2003 to complete higher specialist training in oncology and was appointed to consultant at The Christie in 2005.

Dr Blackhall then established translational research in lung cancer in collaboration with Professor Caroline Dive (CRUK-Manchester Institute). In 2011 this work was recognised with award of the CRUK translational research prize, and in 2012 Dr Blackhall was awarded Christie Hospital Senior Researcher of the year.

Since 2005 she has led a clinical trials portfolio of more than 80 phase I-III trials and has been involved in a number of practice-changing studies delivering promising new drugs and treatment regimens to patients.

Dr Blackhall is the clinical lead for lung cancer at The Christie and Manchester Cancer Research Centre (MCRC) lung cancer research strategy lead. She is also the Clinical Trials Theme Lead for the recently established Cancer Research UK Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence which is a recognised research partnership between the University of Manchester and University College London.

Dr Blackhall's overall objective is to contribute clinically relevant lung cancer research to improve outcomes for lung cancer.

Razelle Kurzrock

Dr. Razelle Kurzrock, MD is a world-renowned physician-scientist leader in precision medicine as well as in the development of novel therapeutics in the field of oncology. She is recognized for founding, developing and chairing one of the largest Phase 1 clinical trial departments globally while at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; the central theme of the department was a personalized medicine strategy. She is also one of the pioneering trialists of the WINTHER precision medicine trial focusing, for the first time, on transcriptomics in addition to genomics. This trial was the signature study of the WIN international consortium (Nature Medicine).

During her time at the University of California San Diego Health, Dr. Kurzrock’s charge was leading the Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy as well as the Experimental Therapeutics program, and she also founded a Rare Tumor Clinic focused on precision medicine. The signature study of the center was the IPREDICT study (Nature Medicine, 2019; Genome Medicine 2021) that gave, for the first time, individualized matched combination therapies to patients with lethal malignancies, hence resulting in improved outcomes.

Dr. Kurzrock has almost 900 publications on Pubmed, an H-index of 129, and has been named to the list of most cited scientists worldwide (Web of Science) and to the list of the 25 most important voices in Precision Medicine globally.

She has four children and three dogs and lives with her husband Dr Philip Cohen, in San Diego, California.

Dr. Kurzrock is Chief Medical Officer of the WIN Consortium.

Gerald Batist

Dr. Gerald Batist is the former Chairman of the Department of Oncology at McGill University and Director of the McGill Centre for Translational Research in Cancer. A major award from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation led to the expansion of the Centre and it’s integration into the Segal Cancer Centre at the Jewish General Hospital, which he also directs.

Dr. Batist is a clinician-scientist, trained in medical oncology and molecular pharmacology. His work, both in his lab and clinical research focuses on therapeutic resistance. This includes large consortia of biopsy-based clinical trials. In 2014 he co-led a successful application that resulted in the establishment of the Canadian National Centre of Excellence in Personalized Medicine, Exactis Innovations. The core feature is a program to build a massive bio bank and database linked to a prospective longitudinal registry of cancer patients followed throughout the trajectory of their illness, a project called ‘Personalize My Treatment’.

In 2016, Dr Batist was appointed Member of the Order of Canada and Knight of the National Order of Quebec.

Christophe Le Tourneau

Prof. Christophe Le Tourneau, M.D, PhD. is senior Medical Oncologist at the Institut Curie and Professor of Medicine at Paris-Saclay University. He is heading the Department of Drug Development and Innovation (D3i) as well as the Head and Neck Clinic.

Christophe Le Tourneau was certified in Medical Oncology in 2005 and got his PhD in Clinical Epidemiology in 2007. He did a 2-year Clinical Research Fellowship at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, Canada, in the Drug Development Program. His main interests are precision medicine, phase I clinical trials with a special attention at the methodology to conduct these trials, as well as Head and Neck oncology.

Christophe Le Tourneau is the principal investigator of numerous phase I and II trials, as well as of clinical trials in Head and Neck oncology. He ran the first randomized precision medicine trial (SHIVA01) that compared the efficacy of matched targeted therapy versus conventional chemotherapy in patients with advances cancer. He has published 140+ peer-reviewed papers in international journals.

Joaquin Mateo

Dr. Joaquin Mateo received his MD from the University of Barcelona in 2006. After completing his medical training in Oncology at the Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO, Barcelona), he completed postgraduate studies in clinical trial design, with a particular focus on early-phase clinical trials with companion biomarker development.

He joined the Drug Development Unit at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and The Institute of Cancer Research (London) in 2011 for a two-year fellowship under the mentorship of Johann de Bono and Stan Kaye, working in first-in-man clinical trials of several PARP inhibitors and compounds targeting the PI3K-AKT-mTOR pathway. From 2013, he progressively focused his work towards the design and development of clinical trials for castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC).

His main interest is the integration of tumour molecular characterisation data into real-time clinical decision-making for patients through multidisciplinary tumour boards, and was involved in the setting up of the molecular tumour boards at the Drug Development Unit and Prostate Cancer Targeted Therapy Unit, The Royal Marsden.

After receiving a joint Medical Research Council & Prostate Cancer UK Fellowship award in 2014, he pursued a PhD at The Institute of Cancer Research (London); the focus of his research centered on achieving a better understand of the prevalence and clinical relevance of germline and somatic DNA repair defects in the progression of prostate cancer and how to therapeutically exploit these aberrations. In 2016, he received a Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award to continue working on the development of PARP inhibitors, platinum-based therapies and companion predictive biomarkers for CRPC patients.

Joaquin joined the Vall d´Hebron Institute of Oncology in November 2017 as Principal Investigator of its newly established Prostate Cancer Translational Research Group to lead research aimed at translating prostate cancer genotypes into phenotypes and a clinically-relevant classification of the disease. He and his team will also seek to build a precision medicine core for prostate cancer patients.

Birgit Geoerger

Dr. Birgit Geoerger, M.D, PhD is a pediatric oncologist heading the Pediatric Early Drug Development Program in the Department of Pediatric and Adolescent Oncology at Gustave Roussy Cancer Center in Villejuif, France. Dr. Geoerger is a key opinion leader in childhood cancer drug development and chaired the Clinical Trial Committee of the Innovation Therapies for Children with Cancer (ITCC) Consortium during 11 years.

She has initiated the MAPPYACTS profiling program and the AcSé-ESMART molecularly guided precision medicine therapeutic platform trial, both sponsored by Gustave Roussy, and is coordinating the pediatric relapse indication of the France Medécine Génomique 2025 program. She had developed and contributed to multiple early clinical, first-in-child and first-in-class trials. Her laboratory group in the INSERM U1015 research laboratory aims at developing new therapies for pediatric cancers.

She has authored more than 130 peer-reviewed publications.

Susan Galbraith

Dr. Susan Galbraith is Executive Vice President, Oncology R&D. She joined AstraZeneca in 2010 and led the development of some of the Company’s most innovative cancer therapies. Prior to this appointment, Susan was Senior Vice-President and Head of Research and Early Development, Oncology R&D, and had overseen the progression of seven programmes into Phase III trials, with four new medicines now approved around the world: Lynparza (olaparib), the first-in-class PARP inhibitor approved in ovarian, breast, prostate and pancreatic cancers; Tagrisso (osimertinib), a third-generation, irreversible epidermal growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) approved in lung cancer; Orpathys (savolitinib), an oral, potent and highly selective MET TKI approved in China for non-small cell lung cancer patients with MET exon 14 skipping alterations; and Koselugo (selumetinib), an inhibitor of mitogen-activated protein kinase  approved in paediatric patients with neurofibromatosis type 1 with plexiform neurofibromas.

Susan has over 20 years of experience in drug discovery and development with a background as a clinical oncologist. She trained in medicine at Manchester and Cambridge Universities, was admitted to the Royal College of Physicians in 1992, and then trained in clinical oncology in London. In 1997, Susan gained a Fellowship of the Royal College of Radiologists and completed a PhD at the University of London involving translational work on a vascular-targeting molecule. In 2017, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Medical Science from the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), and in 2018 was admitted to the Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

In addition to her role at AstraZeneca, Susan serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the ICR and on the European Association of Cancer Research Advisory Council. In 2021, Susan was elected to the Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research. She is also a member of the Cambridge Cancer Centre Executive Committee.