Early Career Scientist Speed Mentoring Event

Early Career Scientist Speed Mentoring Event

Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024  |  8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m. CST*  |  Event Full

Marriott Marquis Houston Downtown - Level 3

*Times and program schedule subject to change. SITC membership is required for participation in the ECS Speed Mentoring event.
For additional questions, please contact Renee Reyes at rreyes@sitcancer.org.

Program Organizers

  • Ardit Feinaj, MD – Johns Hopkins University
  • Robyn Gartrell, MD – Johns Hopkins University
  • Sarah Gitto, PhD – University of Pennsylvania
  • Tanya Keenan, MD, MPH – Merck Research Laboratories
  • Ashley Koegel, MD – Bristol Myers Squibb
  • Daniel Michaud, PhD – Brigham & Women’s Hospital
  • Abdul Rafeh Naqash, MD – Stephenson Cancer Center, Oklahoma University
  • Abigail Overacre-Delgoffe, PhD – University of Pittsburgh
  • Quaovi Sodji, MD, PhD – University of Wisconsin-Madison 

 

Program Description

The ECS Speed Mentoring Event will provide early career scientists the opportunity to receive mentorship from an expert in the field of cancer immunotherapy in a one-on-one setting. Hosted by SITC's Early Career Scientist Committee, mentees will be matched with an expert mentor allowing time for a discussion with an expert mentor. Also, during this event we will provide an opportunity for networking in an adjoining area. Mentees are required to indicate interest to attend this event when registering for SITC's annual meeting. Mentees are selected on a first come first serve basis and will be contacted for participation. 

Target Audience

The audience for the ECS Speed Mentoring Event includes Students and Scientists-in-Training who are seeking one-on-one career mentorship from experts in the field of cancer immunotherapy. Clinical fellows and clinical residents are also welcome to apply for this event. All mentees should be prior to assistant professorship. SITC membership is required for participation in the ECS Speed Mentoring event. Click here to become a member.

Mentorship Topics

  • Basic/Translational Science

    • Valsamo Anagnostou, MD, PhD – Johns Hopkins University

    • Niroshana Anandasabapathy, MD, PhD – Weill Cornell Medicine

    • Riyue Bao, PhD – UPMC Hillman Cancer Center

    • Tullia Bruno, PhD –  University of Pittsburgh

    • Greg Delgoffe, PhD – University of Pittsburgh

    • Sandra Demaria, MD – Weill Cornell Medicine

    • Olivera Finn, PhD, FAIO – University of Pittsburgh

    • Cara Haymaker, PhD – The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

    • Patrick Hwu, MD – Moffitt Cancer Center

    • Elizabeth Jaffee, MD, FAIO – Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center/Johns Hopkins University

    • Russell Jenkins, MD, PhD – Massachusetts General Hospital Center

    • Christopher Johnston, PhD – Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center

    • Nikhil Joshi, PhD – Yale School of Medicine

    • Lewis Lanier, PhD – University of California, San Francisco 

    • David Liu, MD, MPH, MS – Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

    • Andy Minn, MD, PhD – University of Pennsylvania

    • Daniel Powell, PhD – University of Pennsylvania

      • Yuliya Pylayeva, PhD - UNC AT Chapel Hill

       

    • Sergio Quezada, PhD – University of College London

    • Jeffrey Rathmell, PhD – Vanderbilt University Medical Center

    • Yvonne Saenger, MD – Montefiore Einstein Comprehensive Cancer Center

    • Stephen Schoenberger, PhD – La Jolla Institute for Immunology

    • Arlene Sharpe, MD, PhD, FAIO – Harvard Medical School
    •  Michelle Williams, PhD – University of Pittsburgh
  • Clinician Scientists Academia

    • Diwakar Davar, MD – University of Pittsburgh Medical Center/Hillman Cancer Center

    • Sangeeta Goswami, MD, PhD – University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

    • Micheal Lotze, MD – University of Pittsburgh

    • Thomas Marron, MD, PhD – Mount Sinai

    • Marco Ruelle, MD – University of Pennsylvania

    • Ryan Sullivan, MD – Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center
  • Consulting Firms/Management
    • Elana Fertig, PhD, FAIMBE - Johns Hopkins University
    • William Grossman, MD - Gilead Sciences
  • Government Jobs
    • Helen Chen, MD – National Cancer Institute

    • Marc Ernstoff, MD – National Institute of Health

    • Stephanie Goff, MD, PhD – National Cancer Institute

    • James Gulley, MD, PhD – National Cancer Institute

  • Group Mentors
    • Allison Betof Warner, MD, PhD - Stanford University School of Medicine

    • Christian Capitini, MD - The University of Wisconsin - Madison
    • Zachary Cooper, PhD - AstraZeneca
    • Golnaz Morad, DDS, PhD - The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
    • Nicole Scharping, PhD - The University of California San Diego
    • Michael Surace, PhD - AstraZeneca
    • Sarah Warren, PhD - Gilead Sciences
    • Drew Wilfarht, PhD - University of Pittsburgh
    • Roberta Zappasodi, PhD - Weill Cornell Medicine
  • Industry: Non-Lab-Based
    • Ivan Diaz-Padilla, MD, PhD – GSK

    • Friedrich Finckenstein, MD – Iovance Biotherapuetics

    • Ezo Gruyters, PhD – AstraZeneca

    • Parameswaran Hari, MD – Obsidian Therapeutics

    • Kristen Hege, MD

    • Stephen Lim, MD – Novartis

    • Pablo Martinez, MD, PhD – Amgen

    • Giovanni Melillo, MD – AstraZeneca

    • Jon Wiggington, MD – Bright Peak Therapeutics

  • Industry: Research and Development/Translational

    • Lisa Butterfield, PhD – Merck

    • Daniel Chen, MD, PhD – Synthetic Design Lab

    • Guy Clifton, MD – Incendia Therapeutics

    • Leisha Emens, MD, PhD – Ankyra Therapeutics

    • Priti Hegde, PhD – Ankyra Therapeutics

    • Howard Kaufman, MD – Ankyra Therapeutics

    • Akshay Krishnamurty, PhD – Genentech, Inc.

    • Gordan Moody, PhD – AstraZeneca

    • Emmett Schmidt, MD, PhD – Ankyra Therapeutics

  • Start-Up and Biotech

    • Patrick Baeuerle, PhD – Cullinan Therapeutics

    • Rachel Humphrey, MD – Normunity, Inc.

    • Johanna Kaufman, PhD - Deck Bio

    • Francesco Marincola, MD – Sonata

    • Arvind Natarajan, PhD – Iovance

    • Zhen Su, MD, MBA – Marengo Therapeutics

    • Dario Vignali, PhD – University of Pittsburgh

    Program Faculty

    *Mentors are subject to change and one-on-one time with any particular mentor or mentoring in any particular topic cannot be guaranteed.

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    Valsamo Anagnostou, MD, PhD

    Johns Hopkins University


    Dr. Anagnostou is an Associate Professor of Oncology in the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. 

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    She graduated from the Medical School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece and received a PhD in cancer biology from the same institution. Dr. Anagnostou completed her internal medicine residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital and subsequently trained in Medical Oncology at Johns Hopkins. She has established the Molecular Oncology laboratory that seeks to understand the genomic wiring of response and resistance to immunotherapy through integrative genomic, transcriptomic, single-cell and liquid biopsy analyses of tumor and immune evolution. She is also the Director of the Thoracic Oncology Biorepository at Johns Hopkins.
    Her group has discovered novel mechanisms of response and resistance to immunotherapy and is also developing liquid biopsy assays that capture the dynamics of response and may more accurately predict emergence of resistance to immunotherapy. Her work has provided the foundation for a molecular response-adaptive clinical trial, where therapeutic decisions are made not based on imaging but based on molecular responses derived from liquid biopsies.
    Overall, Dr. Anagnostou focuses on studying the temporal and spatial order of the metastatic and immune cascade under the selective pressure of immunotherapy with the ultimate goal to translate this knowledge into “next-generation” immuno-oncology clinical trials and change the way oncologists select patients for these therapies.

    Patrick Baeuerle, PhD

    Cullinan Therapeutics


    Patrick A. Baeuerle studied biology at the universities of Konstanz and Munich (LMU) and holds a M.Sc. from the University of Konstanz and a Ph.D. (summa cum laude) from the LMU. 

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    He trained at the Max-Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Martinsried and at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL, Heidelberg) with Prof. Wieland Huttner. Patrick’s graduate work was on tyrosine sulfation of proteins. From 1987-1989, he performed post-doctoral training with Nobel laureate Dr. David Baltimore at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) where he discovered IkappaB and RelA (p65) subunits of transcription factor NF-kappaB.

    Back in Germany, Patrick led an independent research group at the GeneCenter of the LMU in Martinsried (Director: Prof. Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker) where he deciphered the canonical pathway of NF-kappaB activation and novel functional aspects of the transcription factor. His habilitation at the LMU was in 1992. At the age of 34, Patrick was called as Professor and Chairman of Biochemistry to the Medical Faculty of the University of Freiburg. After less than three years in Freiburg, he moved to California to head up small molecule drug discovery at Tularik, a biopharmaceutical start-up company based in South San Francisco, California.

    From California, Patrick moved back to Martinsried in 1998 where he became Chief Scientific Officer of Micromet, a biopharmaceutical company founded by Prof. Gert Riethmueller and colleagues at the Institute for Immunology of the LMU. Over the years, Micromet became a pioneer in the industry in the development of T cell-engaging bispecific (BiTE) antibodies for cancer therapy. Its CD19/CD3-bispecific BiTE antibody blinatumomab and drug pipeline led to the acquisition of Micromet by AMGEN in 2012. Blinatumomab was approved by the FDA in 2014 in less than three months as Blincyto®, a therapy for treatment of patients with relapsed/refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Patrick served for the following three years as Vice President of Research and General Manager of AMGEN Research Munich GmbH.

    In 2015, Patrick joined the US-based venture capital firm MPM Capital LLC as an Executive Partner. After nine years as an executive partner and investment committee member, he continues his engagement as a member MPM’s medical and scientific advisory board. Patrick has co-founded at MPM a total of eight companies developing novel cancer therapies: Harpoon, iOmx, Maverick, TCR², Werewolf, Aktis, Cullinan and Crossbow. At Cullinan, he serves as Chief Scientific Advisor and Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board. Patrick is a scientific advisor to iOmx, Aktis and Crossbow as scientific advisor. Four of Patrick’s companies went public on NASDAQ (TCR², Harpoon, Cullinan and Werewolf), three companies (Maverick, TCR² and Harpoon) were acquired, and three are still private (iOmx, Aktis and Crossbow).

    Patrick is the recipient of Xconomy’s 2019 “Entrepreneur (“X”) of the Year Award”, and of EMBL’s 2019 Lennart Philipson Award in recognition of his many contributions to the development of cancer immunotherapies. In 2021, he was elected by Endpoints News to be among the 20 most influential R&D executives. To date, Patrick's 257 PubMed-listed papers have been cited more than 88,000 times and led to a Hirsch index of 145 (Google Scholar, June 2024). Research.com lists him among the best biologists and biochemists in 2024, ranked no. 236 globally, and no. 172 in the USA.. Patrick Baeuerle is an elected member of the Leopoldina and the EMBO.

    Tullia Bruno, PhD

    University of Pittsburgh


    Tullia C. Bruno, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh and a faculty member in the Tumor Microenvironment Center and the Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy Program at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. 

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    She obtained her Ph.D. in Immunology from Johns Hopkins in 2010 and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Colorado in 2015—both with a focus in tumor immunology.  While Dr. Bruno’s PhD training focused on inhibitory receptors on intratumoral T cells, she became interested in the role of B cells and tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS) in the tumor microenvironment (TME) during her postdoctoral fellowship and has built her independent research program around understanding intratumoral B cell and TLS function in multiple human cancers.  Dr. Bruno’s research lab has an overt focus on studying immunity within cancer patients, which makes her research highly translational with the potential for future clinical trials targeting B cells. Thus, Dr. Bruno’s overall research objective is to develop a B cell-specific immunotherapy in the next five to ten years.  Dr. Bruno is actively involved in the UPMC Hillman community, and is an advocate for women in science, as is evidenced by her current role as chair of the UPMC Hillman Women's Initiatives Taskforce and her contributions to the Society of Immunotherapy's Women in Immunotherapy group.

    Daniel Chen, MD, PHD

    Synthetic Design Lab


    Daniel S. Chen, MD, PhD, is the founder of Engenuity Life Sciences and Synthetic Design Lab, former Vice President, Global Head of Cancer Immunotherapy Development at Genentech/Roche and former Chief Medical Officer for IGM Biosciences. 

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    He received a BS degree in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1990), a PhD in Microbiology & Immunology (1996) and MD (1998) from the University of Southern California. His PhD work and publications focused on “Early Events in Coronavirus Infection.” Daniel completed an Internal Medicine Residency and Medical Oncology Fellowship at Stanford University (2003). He went on to complete a Post-doctoral fellowship with Mark Davis in Immunology, where he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Associate. He also ran the metastatic melanoma clinic at the Stanford Cancer Center from 2003-2006. In that time, he studied human anti-cancer immune responses pre- and post- cancer vaccination and cytokine administration to determine why anti-tumor immune responses were not more clinically effective. He received a U19 grant to develop better immunologic tools to interrogate human immune responses and ultimately patented the MHC cellular microarray to detect and functionally characterize antigen-specific T cell states. He continued as Adjunct Clinical Faculty at Stanford from 2006-2016, where he cared for melanoma patients. At Genentech from 2006-2018, Daniel focused on the clinical development of anti-angiogenic, antibody drug conjugates and immune modulatory targeted therapies in both early and late Development, as well as the diagnostic tools to aid their development. This included leading the clinical development for atezolizumab, a PD-L1 inhibitor, from the time the program was in research through IND, Phase I, Phase II, Phase III, to filing and approvals in multiple indications worldwide. At IGM Biosciences, Daniel focused on the development of novel engineered multivalent therapeutics and helped lead this from pre-clinical to having multiple therapeutics in the clinic in Phase I/II. He is a reviewer for Nature, Immunity, Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer and Clinical Cancer Research, served on the Board of Directors for SITC, has been a recurring session organizer and session chair for PEGS Europe on engineered therapeutics since 2019, gave the keynote presentation at the AACR NCI EORTC Annual Meeting 2014 and presented at the US Congressional Briefing on Immuno Oncology in 2017. He has continued to publish with academic and industry collaborators in the field of cancer immunotherapy, including the often-referenced Chen and Mellman manuscripts, “Oncology meets Immunology: the Cancer-Immunity Cycle,” “Elements of cancer immunity and the cancer-immune set point” and the Hegde and Chen manuscript “Top 10 Challenges in Cancer Immunotherapy.”

    Diwakar Davar, MD

    University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Hillman Cancer Center


    Greg M. Delgoffe is Associate Professor of Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh, and Director of the Tumor Microenvironment Center at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. 

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    Dr. Delgoffe obtained his PhD at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 2010, and completed postdoctoral training at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Since its inception, Dr. Delgoffe’s lab has worked to both understand how immune cells alter their functional and differentiate state through integration of metabolic cues, most notably in cancer. He studies how immune cells become metabolically deficient as they infiltrate tumors and leverage that insight into metabolic strategies to bolster immunotherapy for cancer. Much of his work has been translated into novel therapeutics and clinical trials repurposing metabolic drugs as immunometabolic agents to improve immunotherapy, most notably in the spaces of checkpoint blockade, oncolytic virus, and adoptive cell therapies. He is extremely competitive for funding from federal, philanthropic, and foundation sources, and has received multiple awards lauding the innovative aspects of his research program, including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and the Cancer Research Institute’s Lloyd J Old STAR Award. Work from his laboratory has been licensed to large pharma to be developed into clinical agents, and he sits on the Scientific Advisory Board of several biotech companies. Importantly, he has also founded two Pittsburgh-based companies based on work from his laboratory, Novasenta and RemplirBio, which are working to develop therapeutic agents to enhance immunity to cancer.

    Ivan Diaz-Padilla, MD, PhD

    GSK


    Ivan Diaz-Padilla is board-certified in Medical Oncology by the Spanish Ministry of Health.

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    After his foundational medical oncology residency training in Madrid, and a preceptorship in Early Drug Development at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, UK, he subsequently completed a two-year clinical research fellowship in Gynecologic Oncology and Drug Development at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center in Toronto, Canada. Ivan obtained his PhD from the University of Seville, Spain, for his clinical and translational research on the role of notch inhibition in ovarian cancer.
    Dr. Diaz-Padilla accumulated more than ten years of clinical practice experience before moving into the pharmaceutical industry. In April 2013 he joined the department of Oncology Global Development at Novartis, where he was a member of the clinical development team that ultimately led alpelisib to be the first-in-class PI3K inhibitor approved in breast cancer. Subsequently, Ivan led the clinical development of the CDK4/6 inhibitor ribociclib in premenopausal women with metastatic hormone-receptor sensitive breast cancer, achieving its registration. From January 2019 until March 2021, Ivan served as the Global Clinical Development Lead for the DNA-damage repair (DDR) portfolio at Merck KGaA/EMD Serono, where he was accountable for the early clinical strategy of three DDR programs (DNA-PKi, ATRi, and ATMi).
    In April 2021 Dr. Diaz-Padilla joined GSK. In his current role as Global Clinical Head Immuno-Oncology, Dr. Diaz-Padilla oversees a team of medical directors and clinical scientists responsible for the implementation of the clinical development strategy of all the assets across the GSK Immuno-Oncology portfolio, from proof-of-concept to registration.
    Based in Zug, Switzerland, Ivan is married, has two daughters and enjoys practicing sports, like skiing, swimming, cycling, and running.

    Marc Ernstoff, MD

    National Institute of Health


    Dr. Marc Ernstoff joined the NCI Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis, Developmental Therapy Program in 2020 as Medical Officer and the new Chief of the ImmunoOncology Branch. 

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    He has over 40 years experience in studying the immunobiology of human cancer and the development of new immune therapies. Dr. Ernstoff did his Medical Oncology and cancer immunology training at Yale University where he stayed as an Assistant Professor of Medicine prior to joining the medical oncology and translational immunotherapy program at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. Much of his career was spent at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine where he was Section Chief of Hematology/Oncology and the Deputy Director of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center. He was also the Director of the Melanoma Program at the Cleveland Clinic. Prior to joining NCI, he was Professor and Chair, Department of Medicine, Senior Vice President for Clinical Investigation, The Katherine Anne Gioia Chair of Medicine at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. He published over 250 original research manuscripts in the areas of renal cell cancer, melanoma and immune therapy strategies including cytokine therapies, dendritic cell vaccines, immune checkpoint inhibition, targeted therapies and ex vivo expanded effector cells for adoptive transfer.

    Friedrich Finckenstein, MD

    Iovance Biotherapeutics


    Dr. Graf Finckenstein joined Iovance in July 2019. 

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    He is a physician-scientist with decades of experience in clinical medicine, laboratory cancer research and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry. Prior to joining Iovance he was the Global Head of Oncology Translational Medicine at Roche Pharma Research and Early Development (pRED) in Basel, Switzerland, where he led all clinical development aspects in the Oncology Discovery and Translational area, including the design and conduct of clinical trials, exploratory development studies and translational medicine, biomarker and personalized healthcare strategy. Earlier, Dr. Graf Finckenstein held multiple clinical leadership roles at Bristol-Myers Squibb, where he worked on an array of products from early clinical development to late stage, including key contributions to the approval of Opdivo® in lung cancer. Dr. Graf Finckenstein has a medical degree from the University of Hamburg in Germany. He holds a German medical license, a pediatric board certification, and has conducted basic cancer research at the Ludwig Institute, San Diego Branch, the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and the University of Hamburg.

    Stephanie Goff, MD, PhD

    National Cancer Institute


    Stephanie L. Goff, MD, FACS is a Senior Research Physician, surgical oncologist, and Head of Clinical Operations in the Surgery Branch of the National Cancer Institute at the NIH. 

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    She has received NIH and NCI Director’s Awards for clinical and scientific excellence, as well as the intramural Clinical Center Clinician of the Year. She is a subject matter expert in the field of cellular therapy for cancer, particularly with tumor infiltrating lymphocytes. Her research interests include adoptive cell therapy for the treatment of solid tumors and exploring therapeutic options for patients with treatment-refractory metastatic melanoma.

    William Grossman, MD

    Gilead Sciences


    Bill joined Gilead Sciences in July 2021 as the Senior Vice President and Therapeutic Area Head of Oncology Clinical Development to oversee the company’s Oncology portfolio and collaboration programs.

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    Prior to that, he held Chief Medical Officer roles at Arcus Biosciences and Bellicum Pharmaceuticals. He has held additional leadership roles at Merck, Biothera, AbbVie and Genentech/Roche. Bill has more than 25 years of experience in oncology, having begun his career as a practicing hematologist/oncologist with expertise in bone marrow transplants before moving into the biopharmaceutical industry. At the Medical College of Wisconsin, he was Founder and Medical Director of the Clinical Immunodiagnostic and Research Laboratory, Professor for Microbiology and Genetics and Director of the Bone Marrow Transplant Division for the Immunodeficiency Transplant Program. 

    Bill received his MD and PhD in Immunology from Washington University School of Medicine’s Medical Scientist Training Program and completed his medical and post-doctoral training in the Divisions of Pediatrics and Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine.

    James Gulley, MD, PhD

    National Cancer Institute


    Dr. James Gulley is an internationally recognized expert in immunotherapy for cancer.

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    He graduated from Loma Linda University in California with a PhD in microbiology in 1994 and an MD in 1995. As part of this eight-year MD/PhD Medical Scientist Training Program, he completed a dissertation on tumor immunology. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Emory University in 1998, followed by a Medical Oncology fellowship at the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
    Dr. Gulley serves within the Center for Cancer Research (CCR) of the National Cancer Institute as Co-Director of the Center for Immuno-Oncology, and also serves as the Clinical Director, NCI. He has been instrumental in the clinical development of multiple immunotherapeutic agents and has led multiple first-in-human immunotherapy studies through phase 3 clinical trials. He was the coordinating PI of an international trial of avelumab that led to regulatory approval. He was the PI of the first-in-human international study of a first in class agent, bintrafusp alfa, which targets PDL1 and TGF-beta. He also leads a number of rationally designed, cutting edge combination immunotherapy studies.
    Dr. Gulley is the Interim Editor-in-Chief of JITC and the Vice President of SITC. He serves on many national and NIH boards and committees. He has been an investigator on over 200 clinical trials and has authored over 350 scientific papers or chapters which have been cited over 25,000 times. He has made hundreds of scientific presentations at universities or national / international meetings. He has had multiple awards including the 2010 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest award bestowed by the US President on investigators early in their careers. He also was awarded the 2018 Hubert H. Humphrey Award for Service to America for contributing to the health, safety, and well-being of the nation by helping to get FDA approval for avelumab for Merkel cell carcinoma and urothelial carcinoma and has received numerous NCI or NIH Director’s Awards.

    Cara Haymaker, PhD

    The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center


    Cara Haymaker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Translational Molecular Pathology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. 

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    Dr. Haymaker is actively involved in immune profiling of clinical trials performed at MDA as Director of both the MDA Moonshots Translational Molecular Pathology-Immunoprofiling Platform (TMP-IL) and the CCSG developmental Oncology Research and Immune-monitoring core (ORION) as well as nationally as co-PI of the NCI-funded MDA Cancer Immune Monitoring and Analysis Center (CIMAC). 
    Dr. Haymaker’s research program is divided into two main themes with the overall goal of defining the tumor immune microenvironment in rare solid tumors such as pleural mesothelioma (PM) and sarcoma where responses to immunotherapy strategies are lacking. Theme 1 is focused on investigating ways to modulate intratumoral antigen presenting cells (APCs), specifically dendritic cells, to improve antigen presentation and costimulation to tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL). This involves deeply assessing the immune landscape, identifying dendritic cell subsets and associated TIL populations and directly assessing receptor-ligand interactions through spatial profiling and single cell sequencing. Theme 2 is focused on defining the anti-tumor T cell response. This theme utilizes TIL expansion to provide an in vitro model system to directly assess TIL cytotoxicity, polyfunctionality, anti-tumor function and identification of anti-tumor TCRs and underlying mechanisms driving T cell dysfunction such as altered metabolic states.

    Kristen Hege, MD

     


    Kristen Hege recently retired from BMS where she was responsible for advancing a pipeline of small molecules, biologics and cell therapies from first-in-human studies through clinical proof-of-concept. 

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    In addition, she led the 2Seventybio (formerly bluebird)-partnered BCMA CART cell program (Abecma) in multiple myeloma from inception through FDA approval. Prior to BMS she held a similar role at Celgene as well as executive roles in biotech at Cell Genesys, Cellerant, and Theraclone.

    In addition to her work at BMS, Kristen was a Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF where she saw patients with blood cancers weekly.  She also serves on the Board of Directors of Mersana Therapeutics and Graphite Bio and served on the Board of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) for a 3-year term from 2016-2019. 

    Kristen received her MD at UCSF and internal medicine and hematology/oncology subspecialty training at Harvard and UCSF, respectively. In 2015 she was recognized by Fierce Biotech as one of the top 12 women in Biopharma, in 2019 by the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association as a “Luminary”, in 2021 by San Francisco Business Times as one of the most influential women in Bay Area business, and in 2022 by UCSD with the Duane Roth Career Achievement Award for advances in science and medicine. Her career path and long history with CAR T cell development was featured as one of 25 physicians and scientists recognized as part of the 25th anniversary celebration of Nature Medicine and by Forbes magazine in 2022 as one of “50 women over 50: entrepreneurs” in recognition of her leadership role in the development of Abecma.

    Dr. Hege retired from BMS in March 2023 to pursue her decades long dream of thru hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and is using this adventure to raise funds to support early career physician scientists pursuing careers in cellular immunotherapy research. 

    Patrick Hwu, MD

    Normunity Inc.


    Patrick Hwu, MD, is the president and CEO of Moffitt Cancer Center, one of the nation’s leading cancer hospitals and the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center based in Florida.

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    As an internationally recognized tumor immunologist, Hwu has led pioneering research and clinical efforts to better understand the interactions between tumors and the immune system. He helped launch the field of gene modified T cells, publishing research on the first chimeric antigen receptor directed against cancer. His work focuses on vaccines, adoptive T-cell therapies and immune resistance. 
     
    Prior to joining Moffitt, Dr. Hwu was the head of the Division of Cancer Medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he held various leadership roles for 17 years. 

    Russell Jenkins, MD, PhD

    Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center


    Dr. Jenkins obtained his Bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Virginia in 2002 and his MD/PhD at the Medical University of South Carolina in 2012. 

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    He completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2014 and his clinical oncology training in the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center in 2017.  He conducted his post-doctoral research in Dr. David Barbie's lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where he developed a novel platform to study ex vivo response to PD1- blockade using organotypic tumor spheroids.  In 2018, he joined the faculty at the MGH Cancer Center in the Center for Melanoma and Center for Cancer Research. Dr. Jenkins was the inaugural Termeer Early Career Investigator in Systems Pharmacology and a member of the Laboratory for Systems Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. He is also an Associate Member of the Cancer Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.  The Jenkins laboratory studies mechanisms of response and resistance to PD-1 blockade with a focus on developing rational combination therapies to overcome resistance to cancer immunotherapy.

    Howard Kaufman, MD

    Ankyra Therapeutics/Massachusetts General Hospital


    Dr. Howard L. Kaufman has been a leading authority on tumor immunotherapy for the treatment of melanoma. 

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    He pioneered the development of recombinant viral vectors encoding eukaryotic tumor antigens and immune modulatory genes for cancer therapy and has conducted over 50 cancer vaccine and immunotherapy clinical trials. He led the first successful phase III trial of an oncolytic herpes virus that demonstrated clinical benefit in patients with melanoma resulting in the first FDA approval of an oncolytic virus for the treatment of cancer. He also recently completed a positive clinical trial demonstrating therapeutic responses of a new PD-L1-directed monoclonal antibody in patients with Merkel cell carcinoma. Dr. Kaufman has maintained a funded laboratory in tumor immunology for nearly 20 years. He was born in Chicago, Illinois and received his MD degree from Loyola University, completed a residency in General Surgery at Boston University and fellowship training in Tumor Immunology and Surgical Oncology at the National Cancer Institute. He has previously held appointments as Chief of the Division of Surgical Oncology and Associate Director of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University, inaugural Director of the Rush University Cancer Center, and Associate Director for Clinical Science of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey. Dr. Kaufman has published over 500 peer-reviewed scientific papers, books, review articles and abstracts and serves on the editorial board of the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer, The Oncologist and Journal of Translational Medicine. He is a member of numerous professional societies and served as President of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer. Dr. Kaufman was the recipient of several awards including the Daland Prize, MRF Humanitarian Award and UIC Distinguished Alumnus Award. He has been appointed to the Board of Directors of several professional organizations, including the Melanoma Research Foundation, Melanoma Research Alliance, Commission on Cancer, American Cancer Society-Eastern Division and the University of Illinois Chicago College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He is currently Chief Medical Officer at Ankyra Therapeutics and maintains an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School and is part of the melanoma service at Massachusetts General Hospital.

    Akshay Krishnamurty, PhD

    Genentech, Inc.


    Dr. Akshay Krishnamurty is a Principal Scientist and Group Leader in the Cancer Immunology department at Genentech. 

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    Dr. Krishnamurty and his team are focused on further understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate anti-tumor immunity and response to immunotherapy, with a particular focus on understanding the interplay between stromal cells and immune cells within the tumor microenvironment. 

    Current areas of research in the Krishnamurty lab include: 
    1) Understanding the signals that drive the formation of heterogeneous populations of cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) in tumors and the functional influence of CAFs on anti-tumor immunity. 
    2) Elucidating the mechanisms by which tumor-associated tertiary lymphoid structures form, are maintained, and function to modulate anti-tumor immunity
    3) Understanding the role of lymph node fibroblastic reticular cells and their influence on anti-tumor immune responses in tumor draining and metastatic lymph nodes. 

    The Krishnamurty lab aims to integrate high-resolution multiomic technologies, in vivo pre-clinical models, genetic tools, imaging techniques, and human clinical data to better understand these complex cellular interactions with the hopes of inspiring the development of novel immunotherapy strategies for patients. 

    Prior to starting his own group, Dr. Krishnamurty completed his Ph.D in the Department of Immunology from the University of Washington where he trained in Dr. Marion Pepper's lab. Dr. Krishnamurty then went on to complete his post-graduate training in the Cancer Immunology department at Genentech in Dr. Shannon Turley's lab.

    Steven Lim, MD

    Novartis Pharmaceuticals


    Dr. Stephen Lim is a senior medical director for Novartis the CAR-T program. 

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    He completed his fellowships in Hematology and Medical Oncology at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine/UCLA Medical Center and Los Angeles County-Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

    Michael Lotze, MD

    University of Pittsburgh


    Michael T. Lotze, MD, FACS is Professor of Surgery, Immunology, and Bioengineering; Director of the DAMP Laboratories at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center within the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Hillman Cancer Center. 

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    He is a long-time SITC enthusiast, attending his first meeting in Williamsburg in 1989, presiding over the Society in 1998, and launching both the Primer on Tumor Immunology as well as the SITC Clinical Immuno-Oncology Network (SCION) to advance the most rigorous and robust clinical protocols in immunotherapy of cancer. Dr. Lotze is the co-inventor of 10 patents in dendritic cell vaccines and antigen discovery, 13 patents in tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy (while at Lion/Iovance Biotherapeutics 2016-2018), and additional patents at Nurix Therapeutics (2020-2023), where he served as Chief Cell Therapy Officer 2020-2023. He is an award-winning NCI-trained scientist (1978-1990), the inaugural Director of Surgical Oncology at Pitt (1990-2000), former Vice President of Research at GlaxoSmithKline (1999-2001), founding director of the UPCI Academy, and innovative educator as a prolific clinician-scientist/tumor immunologist with over 500 publications and several books. He is currently Editor in Chief of the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer (2024).

    Thomas Marron, MD, PhD

    Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai


    Thomas Marron MD PhD is the Director of the Early Phase Trials Unit (EPTU) at the Tisch Cancer Institute, and an Associate Professor of Medicine and an Associate Professor of Immunology and Immunotherapy at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. 

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    He holds a PhD in immunology, and his research program focuses on development of novel immunotherapies and combinatorial therapeutic approaches. Dr. Marron is the principal investigator or co-investigator on over one hundred clinical trials studying novel immunotherapies and targeted therapies. In the EPTU he also established The Neoadjuvant Research Group to Evaluate Therapeutics (TARGET), which is a large multidisciplinary team of clinicians and scientists tasked with defining how novel therapies work through biospecimen-rich window-of-opportunity trials. This program exploits novel immune monitoring platforms to characterize tissue, blood and stool from patients, enabling us to resolve the immunodynamic changes induced by standard therapies and by novel immunotherapies. Through defining the determinants of spatial makeup of the tumor immune microenvironment, and resolving the complexity within the lymphoid and myeloid lineages using a variety of single-cell transcriptomic and proteomic platforms, the aim of TARGET is to more rationally design cancer immunotherapy trials, with the ultimate goal of improving patient outcomes. 

    Giovanni Melillo, MD

    AstraZeneca


    Dr. Giovanni Melillo obtained a Medical Doctor degree and a specialty in Medical Oncology from the University of Naples Medical School, Italy. 

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    He was a post-doctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Experimental Immunology of the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland, USA from 1991 to 1996, and a Clinical Oncology Fellow at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health (NIH), from 1996 to 1999. 
    Between 1999 and 2011 Dr. Melillo held the position of Senior Investigator, Head of the Tumor Hypoxia Laboratory, Developmental Therapeutics Program, National Cancer Institute in Frederick where he contributed to the implementation of a translational program for the discovery and development of small molecule inhibitors of Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 and was an attending physician involved in the design and execution of phase I-II clinical trials in Oncology. 
    From 2011 to 2013 Dr. Melillo was Medical Director, Exploratory Clinical and Translational Research at Bristol-Myers Squibb in Princeton, NJ. In September of 2013 he joined AstraZeneca as Global Clinical Lead, Immuno-oncology - Global Medicines Development, where he first contributed to the design of the PACIFIC study and then led the Immuno-oncology Head & Neck clinical program. Since July 2017 he is Vice President, Head of Immuno-oncology, OBU Global Medical Affairs and from 2022 he is the Head of the Gastrointestinal & Emerging Portfolio Franchise with Global Medical Affairs. 
    Dr. Melillo has served as Associate Editor of Cancer Research (2004-2012) and Journal of Molecular Medicine and as Editorial Board member of Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, Cell Cycle, Molecular Cancer, and Cell Death and Disease. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers between research articles, invited reviews and book chapters. 

    Gordan Moody, PhD

    AstraZeneca


    Gordon Moody serves as a Senior Director at AstraZeneca Early Oncology and is a co-founder of the Cell Therapy Unit, established in January 2020. 

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    Leading a team of more than 50 scientists, his primary focus lies in advancing a portfolio of CAR-T programs across various solid tumor types. Additionally, he is involved in the creation of an innovative off-the-shelf allogeneic platform. The team's core objectives include optimizing CAR designs and validating indication-specific strategies to enhance CAR-T efficacy in the suppressive tumor microenvironment. With over 25 years of experience in preclinical oncology drug development, Gordon has contributed to diverse areas, including bi-specific biologics, checkpoint and co-stimulatory immunotherapies, oncolytic viruses, cancer vaccines, as well as small molecules and biologics-based therapies targeting tumors.

    Arvind Natarajan, PhD

    Iovance


    Arvind Natarajan, PhD, MBA, is Senior Vice President of Process and Analytical Development, and Analytical Sciences and Technology at Iovance.  

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    .  He has worked on development and commercialization of AmtagviTM, the first approved T cell therapy for solid tumors (melanoma), and on development of TIL therapies for other solid tumor indications.  He has 25 years of CMC experience in cell and gene therapies, biologics, and vaccines.  
    Prior to joining Iovance, Dr. Natarajan was Global Head of Program Management and Strategy, Cell & Gene Technical Development and Manufacturing at Novartis.  Prior to that, he was the Global CMC Lead for Kymriah®, the first FDA-approved CAR-T therapy.  
    Prior to Novartis, Dr. Natarajan worked at Merck and Co for 15 years.  While at Merck, he worked in biologics on tech transfer and approval of Keytruda®, and in vaccines, supporting development, approval, and commercial manufacturing of Zostavax®, ProQuad®, and Varivax®.  
    Dr. Natarajan earned an MBA from Wharton, a PhD in Chemical Engineering from University of Minnesota, a Masters in Microbial Engineering from University of Minnesota, and a Masters in Biology and BE in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani in India.

    Sergio Quezada, PhD

    University College London


    Sergio Quezada is a Professor of Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy at University College London Cancer Institute and Chief Scientific officer of Achilles Therapeutics. 

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    He earned a Ph.D. in Immunology from Dartmouth Medical School in the US in 2004 before joining the laboratory of Prof James Allison at MSKCC  where he unveiled mechanisms underpinning the anti-tumour activity of anti CTLA-4 antibodies.  
    His work at UCL focuses in tumour microenvironment, regulatory T cells and immune checkpoint-blockade. His team’s research unveiled the role of Fc receptors and the tumour microenvironment in the mechanism of action of anti CTLA-4 antibodies. In the last few years, Prof Quezada and his team co-led the development of a best-in-class Treg-depleting anti-human CD25 antibody acquired by Roche in 2018 and currently in clinical evaluation against solid cancers.
    Prof Quezada’s research also aims to characterization and interrogate immune reactivity and function within tumours, helping identify mechanisms of response and resistance to immunotherapy. His work led to creation of a spin off company, Achilles therapeutics, a clinical stage company delivering personalised T cell therapies against cancer. 
    Prof Quezada was a recipient of Dartmouth’s John W. Strohbern Medal for excellence in biomedical research, the Cancer Research Institute new investigator award, a CRUK Career Development Fellowship and a CRUK Senior Cancer Research Fellowship.  Prof Quezada is a Fellow of the European Academy for Cancer Sciences (2022) and was most recently elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in the UK (2024)

    Marco Ruella, MD

    University of Pennsylvania


    Dr. Marco Ruella obtained his medical degree with high honors and completed his specialization in clinical hematology at the University of Torino, Italy. 

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    He was attending physician at the Hematology and Cell Therapy Division of the Mauriziano Hospital and was an Instructor at the Biotechnology School at the University of Torino. From late 2012, he was a Post-doctoral Fellow, and then an Instructor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Center for Cellular immunotherapies (Drs. June and Gill). From 2017 to 2018 he served as Associate Director of Dr. Carl H. June’s laboratory. In 2018, Dr. Ruella was appointed Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology and the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies and Scientific Director of the Lymphoma Program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Ruella was presented with many awards and honors, including the inaugural SITC EMD-Serono Cancer Immunotherapy Clinical Fellowship (2014), the AACR-BMS Oncology Fellowship in Clinical Cancer Research (2015), the ASH Scholar Award (2016), a NIH K99-R00 award (2017), the “Paola Campese” Award Leukemia Research (2017), the Cancer Support Community Award (2018), the 2018 ASH Joanne Levy, MD, Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement, the Gilead Sciences Research Scholar in Hematology/Oncology and the Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation Award (2020), the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Translational Research Program (2021), the Alan Steinrberg Award (2022), an NIH R01/R37 (2022), an NIH P01 (2023) and was inducted into the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2023. Dr. Ruella is Senior Editor for Molecular Cancer Therapeutics and Associate Editor for JITC. He serves as the inaugural Chair of the SITC Cellular Therapy committee and the Chair of the ASH Scientific Committee on Transplant Biology and Cellular Therapy. Dr. Ruella is the author of numerous peer-reviewed publications on targeted immunotherapies for hematological cancers, an inventor in several patents on CART therapy, and the Scientific Founder of viTToria biotherapeutics.

    Nicole Scharping, PhD

    University of California San Diego


    Dr. Nicole Scharping is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego in Dr. Ananda Goldrath's lab, studying the intersection of T cell memory and exhaustion in cancer. 

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    Dr. Scharping is also a member of SITC Early Career Scientist (ECS) committee.

    Stephen Schoenberger, PhD

    La Jolla Institute for Immunology


    Stephen P. Schoenberger is a translational immunologist working in the area of precision cancer immunotherapy. 

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    Leveraging insights made over more than 30 years of fundamental studies on the immunobiology of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells, he now guides an integrated research consortium involving research scientists, physicians, and bioinformaticians working to identify neoantigens (NeoAg) through a novel functional strategy based on validation, rather than prediction. Three clinical trials involving personalized NeoAg-specific personalized cancer vaccines and adoptive cellular therapy are now underway at the UCSD Moores Cancer Center, with additional IIT’s scheduled for 2023.

    Zhen Su, MD, MBA

    Marengo Therapeutics


    Zhen Su is a physician-scientist and business executive with near three decades of experiences guiding scientific innovations through discovery, clinical development, and commercialization to reach millions of cancer patients around the world. 

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    His unique expertise lies in building and leading both R&D and commercial organizations to create value for scientific innovation and business growth.

    Dario Vignali, PhD

    University of Pittsburgh


    Dario AA Vignali, PhD is the Interim Chair, Distinguished Professor and the Frank Dixon Chair in Cancer Immunology in the Immunology Department at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.  

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    He is also Associate Director for Scientific Strategy and co-leader of the Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy Program in the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center.  His research focuses on molecular and cellular aspects of negative regulatory immune mechanisms including regulatory T cells, inhibitory receptors, and inhibitory cytokines.  His lab was instrumental in uncovering the role of LAG3 in mouse models of cancer, tolerance, autoimmunity and immune regulation.  His lab discovered the inhibitory cytokine IL35 and the NRP1:SEMA4A axis, which are key regulators of intratumoral Treg stability and function.  His current research extensively uses systems immunology approaches to understand transcriptional regulation of effector T cell exhaustion and regulatory T cell function and fate in murine models of cancer and autoimmunity, and numerous human tumors.  He has been a Highly Cited Researcher (top 1% by citations; Clarivate Analytics) for the last six years (2016-2022) and has published over 230 papers with 44 as senior or co-author in high impact journals (IF>10). He has a strong record of extramural funding, which currently includes an NIH P01, R35, two R01 grants and two SPORE projects. His innovative, discovery-based research has led to 15 patent awards (11 in the US) and 11 pending patent applications worldwide, and he is a co-founding scientist of several companies (Potenza Therapeutics [sold to Astellas], Tizona Therapeutics [sold to Gilead], Novasenta). Lastly, he is co-Director of the Cancer Immunology Training Program (NCI T32), and has trained, or currently training, 55 postdoctoral research or clinical fellows and 17 graduate students, with several successfully obtaining extramural fellowships (18 total), emphasizing his commitment to train the next generation of immunologists.

    Jon Wigginton, MD

    Bright Peak Therapeutics


    Jon Wigginton is currently President of Research and Development at Bright Peak Therapeutics, a Basel, Switzerland-based company focused on the development of multifunctional immunocytokines for the treatment of cancer and autoimmune disease. 

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    He previously served as the Chief Medical Officer at both Cullinan Oncology (small molecules and I-O agents) and MacroGenics (CD3-based bispecifics, bispecific checkpoint inhibitors, ADC). There, as part of the senior management team, he helped take both companies public, and oversaw the evolution of these organizations into clinical stage cancer immunotherapy companies. Dr. Wigginton also held leadership positions at Bristol Myers Squibb, including Therapeutic Area Head and Executive Director, Immuno-Oncology Early Clinical Research. There, he led early clinical development of the BMS Immuno-Oncology portfolio, including checkpoint inhibitors such as anti-PD-1 (Nivolumab)/Opdivo®) and anti-PD-L1 (BMS-936559), checkpoint inhibitor-based combinations including anti-CTLA-4 (Yervoy®)/anti-PD-1 (Opdivo®) among others, and a spectrum of other I-O agents. He also co-founded and co-led the BMS International Immuno-Oncology Network (IION). Dr. Wigginton previously served as President of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC). In his academic career, Dr. Wigginton worked at the National Cancer Institute, and served as Head of the Investigational Biologics Section, a basic, translational and clinical research group in the Center for Cancer Research (NCI intramural program). There, his team demonstrated the initial therapeutic synergy and key novel mechanisms of action by several novel cytokine-based therapeutic regimens including IL-2 in combination with IL-12, IL-18 and IL-27 among others. Dr. Wigginton has also served as a board member and advisor to various global biotechnology companies focused on oncology and immuno-oncology. Prior and current mentees serve in various leadership roles in academia as well as large pharma and biotechnology organizations. He earned his M.D. and B.S in biology from the University of Michigan.

    Roberta Zappasodi, PhD

    Weill Cornell Medicine


    Roberta Zappasodi is Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM, New York, NY), faculty member of the Immunology & Microbial Pathogenesis Weill Cornell Graduate Program, Lippmann & McCarthy Research Scholar in Breast Cancer at Weill Cornell, and Member Researcher in the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI). 

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    Her lab studies mechanisms of T-cell regulation suppressing the immune response against cancer, with the goal of devising new modalities to counteract these mechanisms for improving the activity of immunotherapy. 
    Dr. Zappasodi holds a PhD in Tumor Immunology/Immunotherapy from the National Cancer Institute of Milan (Italy). She was a PICI Scholar and Bridge Fellow during her postdoc at Memorial Sloan Kettering (New York, NY) and in her transition to WCM.

    Yuliya Pylayeva-Gupta, PhD

    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill


    Yuliya Pylayeva-Gupta, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Genetics and Microbiology and Immunology, as well as a co-leader of the Immunology Program at the Lineberger Cancer Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

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    Dr. Pylayeva-Gupta has obtained her PhD from the Weill Cornell/Sloan Kettering graduate program and has completed postdoctoral studies at the NYU Langone Medical Center. Dr. Pylayeva-Gupta’s research focus is on developing novel approaches to boost anti-tumor immunity in immunotherapy refractory pancreatic cancer. Her laboratory has focused on B cells as critical components of an effective immune response and is working to understand how B cell responses can be programmed for improved anti-tumor immunity. For her work, Dr. Pylayeva-Gupta has received a Mark Foundation for Cancer Research Emerging Leader Award, NCI MERIT R37 Award, V Foundation Scholar Award and American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award among others.

    Allison Betof Warner, MD, PhD

    Stanford University School of Medicine


    Dr. Allison Betof Warner is an Assistant Professor of Medicine (Oncology), Director of the Melanoma Program, Director of Solid Tumor Cellular Therapy, and Mark & Mary Stevens Endowed Scholar in Melanoma at Stanford University School of Medicine. 

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    Dr. Betof completed her MD and PhD at Duke University, Internal Medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital (Harvard University) and Medical Oncology Fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Betof’s laboratory focuses on understanding resistance to immune checkpoint blockade and cellular therapies for melanoma and other solid tumors. She is the Principal Investigator of clinical trials exploring novel treatments for immunotherapy-refractory melanoma and is internationally recognized for her expertise in brain/CNS metastasis and the use of novel cellular therapies. Dr. Betof has been a pioneer in the use of commercial tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy for the treatment of melanoma and other solid tumors. She has received funding and awards for her clinical and translational investigative work from multiple high-profile organizations, including the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Melanoma Research Alliance, and Melanoma Research Foundation.

    Niroshana Anandasabapathy, MD, PhD

    Weill Cornell Medicine


    Niroshana Anandasabapathy, MD, PhD is Associate Professor of Dermatology in the Department of Dermatology at Weill Cornell Medical College, Vice-Chair of Research in Dermatology, and is actively involved in Immuno-oncology at the Meyer Cancer Center. A practicing physician-scientist with a focus in melanoma, her translational and basic science laboratory researches immune barrier homeostasis and the influence on tumor immune surveillance in both mice and humans.  

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    The Anandasabapathy lab seeks to understand how tissue immune homeostasis is conditioned, maintained, and co-opted by tumors, leading to tumor immune escape.  Her group studies DC: T cell cross-talk in barrier sites, and in tumors. They also study the role of DC in protein vaccine immunity, smallpox immunization, and TRM regulation, and seek to understand how the hierarchy of DC programs in tissues contributes to their behavior.

    Dr. Anandasabapathy received formal training in cancer biology and T cell immunology during her MD Ph.D. at Stanford University, research coupled Dermatology residency at NYU, and received a masters in clinical investigation conducting clinical trials and studying DC biology at the Rockefeller University with the late Ralph Steinman (Nobel Prize 2011), before starting her own lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 2013. She relocated her lab to Weill Cornell Medicine in NYC in 2018  where she has active roles in Dermatology, the Meyer Cancer Center, and precision human immunology.

    Riyue bao, PhD

    UPMC Hillman Cancer Center


    Dr. Bao is a member of the Hillman Cancer Center (HCC) Cancer Biology Program and Co-Director of the UPMC HCC Cancer Bioinformatics. 

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    Dr. Bao’s work bridges methodological advances and biomedical applications with a direct impact on accelerating the knowledge discovery to new clinical trials that could benefit patients. Her lab focuses on the data-driven discovery of resistance mechanisms to cancer immunotherapy, integrating single-cell sequencing, spatial imaging, and deep learning-assisted digital pathology technologies. Her work provides the scientific rationale that has directly led to the opening of new trials that combine targeted therapy with immune checkpoint inhibitors, such as ivosidenib plus nivolumab in IDH1 mutant tumors. Her lab has been continuously funded by NIH P50, P30, and R01 grants. Dr. Bao is Leader of Bioinformatics on the Melanoma and Skin Cancer SPORE and Head and Neck SPORE, member of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Big Data and Data Sharing Committee, and serves as the Ad-Hoc member of the Cancer Center Data Science Strategy Committee.

    Lisa Butterfield, PhD

    Merck


    Lisa H. Butterfield, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Scientist in Discovery-Oncology at Merck, in south San Francisco. 

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    Her focus at Merck is cancer vaccines and immune-oncology biomarkers. She was formerly the Vice President, Research and Development at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), and an Adjunct Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, University California San Francisco. At PICI, she supported cell therapy initiatives and clinical trial biospecimen and biomarker projects. Her academic research has been focused on cancer vaccines and cellular therapies for melanoma, hepatocellular cancer and other tumor types. Dr. Butterfield was previously Professor of Medicine, Surgery, Immunology and Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Pittsburgh (2003-2018) and Director of the Hillman Cancer Center Immunologic Monitoring and Cellular Products Laboratory. She has a PhD in Biology from UCLA, followed by postdoctoral fellowships in Cellular Immunology and Cancer Gene Therapy also at UCLA. She was the President of the Society of Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC, 2017-2018) and a member of the SITC Executive Committee (2015-2020). She led the Immunology Reference Lab for the ECOG-ACRIN NCI cooperative group (2006-2018) and collaborated on biomarker studies in many clinical trials. She has published over 185 peer-reviewed manuscripts, reviews and book chapters, and mentored over 20 students and postdocs. She co-leads the SITC Women’s Leadership Institute, and is a co-Editor of the SITC textbook “Cancer Immunotherapy: Principles and Practice” 1st and 2nd editions. 

    Christian Capitini, MD

    University of Wisconsin-Madison


    Dr. Christian Capitini is an Associate Professor and Chief of Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Bone Marrow Transplant at the University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison, and is co-Director of Developmental Therapeutics at UW Carbone Cancer Center. 

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    He also serves as Director of Clinical Innovation for the UW Forward BIO Institute. Dr. Capitini leads an NIH supported laboratory focusing on development of cell-based therapies including NK cells and CAR T cells for the treatment of childhood solid tumors. The laboratory also manufactures cell-based therapies for complications of bone marrow transplant, including alternatively activated macrophages to treat graft-versus-host-disease and acute radiation syndrome. In the clinic, Dr. Capitini was a site Principal Investigator (PI) for the first multicenter CAR T cell trial, which lead to the FDA approval of tisagenlecleucel-T (Kymriah). Presently he is a site PI for multiple CAR T and TCR T cell, and serves as PI for an investigator-initiated trial studying alpha beta T cell depletion for haploidentical stem cell transplant with post-transplant zoledronic acid for relapsed childhood cancers.

    Dr. Capitini has been an active member of SITC since 2010 and first served as Co-chair of the Early Career Scientist Committee from 2011-2013. He has also served as a representative on the Annual Program Committee (2012-13), the By-laws Committee (2016-17) and the Awards Committee (2018-2022). Dr. Capitini created the first SITC online CME course, Basic Principles to Cancer Immunotherapy, as a pre-requisite to the Advances for Cancer Immunotherapy (ACI) seminar series, and Co-chairs the ACI subcommittee. He is the Section Editor for Commentaries/Editorials for JITC, and was a Co-organizer and now Advisor for the Annual SITC Winter School.

    Helen Chen, MD

    National Cancer Institute


    Dr. Helen Chen joined the Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program (CTEP) of National Cancer Institute (NCI) in 2000. 

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    She currently serves as Associate Chief of the Investigational Drug Branch (IDB) Section III, which focuses on the clinical development of antibody-based therapeutics, active immunotherapies, MAPK and RTK inhibitors as well as antiangiogenic agents. She has also been closely involved in NCI’s efforts on novel agent combinations and is member of the NCI Experimental Therapeutics Committee.
    Dr. Chen graduated from the Shanghai First Medical College of the Fudan University in China. She is board-certified in Medical Oncology after completing the Fellowship Training at Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington D.C. Dr. Chen also serves on external scientific committees including the International Symposium of Anti-angiogenic Therapies and Immunotherapy and the FDA-ASCO-AACR-sponsored Accelerating Anticancer Agent Development and Validation Workshop. She has presented at national and international meetings on strategies of combining novel and targeted agents, early drug development as well as antibody-based therapeutics and antiangiogenic therapies. She is the first or coauthor of over 50 original and review papers in peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Clinical Oncology, Nature Reviews, and New England Journal of Medicine. 

    Sandra Demaria, MD

    Weill Cornell Medicine


    Sandra Demaria, M.D., a native of Turin, Italy, obtained her M.D. from the University of Turin, and then moved to New York City for her post-doctoral training in immunology as a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Research Fund awardee, followed by a residency in anatomic pathology at NYU School of Medicine (NYU SoM).

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    She remained on the faculty at NYU SoM until 2015, raising to the rank of Professor. She is currently Professor of Radiation Oncology and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. Dr. Demaria is internationally known for her pioneering studies demonstrating the synergy of radiation with immunotherapy. Her lab has a central interest in addressing the molecular mechanisms that regulate ionizing radiation’s ability to generate an in situ tumor vaccine in both preclinical models as well as cancer patients.  Seminal findings from her lab include the demonstration that radiation upregulates the expression of chemokines that attract effector T cells to the tumor, activates canonical pathways of viral defense that elicit the production of interferons, and enhances the production and presentation by cancer cells of mutational neoantigens recognized by T cells.  As a breast cancer pathologist Dr. Demaria also studies the immunological microenvironment of breast cancer in patients, and therapeutic strategies to modulate the immune infiltrate in preclinical models and in patients. She has authored more than 130 articles and has received awards from the US National Cancer Institute, American Cancer Society, the Department of Defense CDMRP, and several private Foundations, and serves in the editorial board of the Journal for the ImmunoTherapy of Cancer and Cancer Immunology Research. She is currently the Chair of the AACR Cancer Immunology Working Group, and has previously served in the board of the Society for the Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) and of the Radiation Research Society (RRS).

    Leisha Emens, MD, PhD

    Kaiser Permanente


    Leisha A. Emens, M.D., Ph.D. has been the Senior Vice President of Translational Research at Ankyra Therapeutics since December 1, 2022. 

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    She received her MD/PhD in the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at Baylor College of Medicine, and completed postgraduate training at the National Cancer Institute, the University of Texas at Southwestern, and Johns Hopkins University. She joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University in 2001, where she rose to the rank of Associate Professor of Oncology before joining the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center as Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh in 2018. She is a medical oncologist focused on breast cancer and is internationally recognized for her work in breast cancer immunotherapy. She developed and tested a vaccine for breast cancer patients, and also played a key role in the development of the anti-PD-L1 agent atezolizumab for triple negative breast cancer and HER2+ breast cancer. Dr. Emens was a member of the FDA Advisory Committee on Cellular, Tissue, and Gene Therapies (CTGTC) 2012-2016. She is an active member of ASCO, AACR, ESMO, and SITC, and is a former member of the Cancer Immunology (CIMM) Steering Committee of the AACR. After serving a 2-year term from 2021-2022 as the Vice President of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC), and Dr. Emens ascended to become SITC President in January 2023. She has received several awards for her work, including the President’s Award from the YWCA of Greater Baltimore, the Maryland Governor’s Citation, the Sy Holzer Immunotherapy Research Award, and the Stand Up to Cancer Laura Ziskin Prize in Breast Cancer Translational Research. 

    Elana Fertig, PhD, FAIMBE 

    Johns Hopkins University


    Dr. Fertig advances a new predictive medicine paradigm for oncology by converging systems biology with translational technology development. 

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    Her wet lab develops time course models of therapeutic resistance and single cell technology development for analysis of clinical biospecimens. Her computational methods blend mathematical modeling and artificial intelligence to determine the biomarkers and molecular mechanisms of therapeutic resistance and disease progression from multi-platform genomics data. These techniques have broad applicability to the analysis of clinical biospecimens, developmental biology, and neuroscience. 

    Dr. Fertig is a Professor of Oncology and Division and Associate Cancer Center Director in Quantitative Sciences, co-Director of the Convergence Institute, and co-Director of the Single-Cell Training and Analysis Center at Johns Hopkins University. She has secondary appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Applied Mathematics and Statistics, affiliations in the Institute of Computational Medicine, Center for Computational Genomics, Machine Learning, Mathematical Institute for Data Science, and the Center for Computational Biology and is a Daniel Nathans Scientific Innovator. Prior to entering the field of computational cancer biology, Dr Fertig was a NASA research fellow in numerical weather prediction.  Dr. Fertig's research is featured in over numerous peer-reviewed publications, R/Bioconductor packages, and competitive funding portfolio as PI and co-I.  Notably, she led the team that won the HPN-DREAM8 algorithm to predict phospho-proteomic trajectories from therapeutic response in cancer cells and was elected to the College of Fellows American Institute for Medical and Biomedical Engineering (AIMBE) in 2022. She serves on the editorial boards of the pre-eminent computational biology journals PLoS Computational Biology, Cell Systems, ImmunoInformatics, eLife, and Cancer Research Communications, and as a steering committee member for the NCI Informatics Technology for Cancer Research Consortium.

    Olivera Finn, PhD, FAIO

    University of Pittsburgh


    Dr. Finn is University of Pittsburgh Distinguished Professor of Immunology and Surgery and Founding Chair of the Department of Immunology, the position she held from 2002 to 2013. 

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    She was Program Leader of the Cancer Immunology Program at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute from 1991 to 2014. After receiving her PhD in Medical Microbiology at Stanford University in 1980 and completing her postdoctoral training in Immuno-oncology there in 1982, Dr. Finn started her research at Duke University and in 1991 moved to the University of Pittsburgh.  She gained prominence through her basic and applied research on tumor antigens and cancer vaccines. She has served and currently serves on NCI study sections and was a member of the NCI Board of Scientific Councilors.  Dr. Finn is member of the American Association of Immunologists where she served as President in 2007/2008.  She served two terms as Councilor of the International Union of Immunology Societies (IUIS) and is currently Chair of the IUIS Committee on Gender Equality and Career Development.  She is member of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC). Dr. Finn received numerous awards including the AAI Life Time Achievement Award (2016), the NCI Outstanding Investigator Award (2016), the AACR CIR Lloyd Old Cancer Immunology Prize (2017) and SITC Richard Smalley Award (2019).  In 2019 she was inducted into the inaugural class of AAI Distinguished Fellows.    

    Sangeeta Goswami, MD, PhD

    The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center


    Dr. Sangeeta Goswami is a physician-scientist at the Department of Genitourinary Medical Oncology and the Department of Immunology, Division of Cancer Medicine, at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA.

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    Dr. Goswami obtained her Medical degree from the Gauhati Medical College in Assam, India and PhD in Immunology from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, USA.
    She completed her Internal Medicine Residency from University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and Medical Oncology Fellowship from MD Anderson Cancer Center.
    Dr. Goswami has published numerous original research articles and reviews in high-impact journals such as Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology, Science, Nature Reviews Immunology, and Science Translational Medicine which enabled development of novel combination immunotherapy to treat cancer patients.
    Her clinic is focused on treating patients with renal cell carcinoma and urothelial carcinoma. Her laboratory in the Department of Immunology focuses on understanding the cellular state and plasticity of the tumor-immune ecosystem and its role in determining response to immune checkpoint therapy. Dr. Goswami has designed multiple investigator-initiated clinical trials based on her pre-clinical data and currently leading them as a principal investigator.
    Recently, she was elected to be a part of the “Extended Leadership Team” for the Break Through Cancer (BTC) GBM team, a research alliance between The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC), Dana Farber Cancer Institute, MIT, Johns Hopkins and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. As a part of this multi-disciplinary alliance, Dr. Goswami will lead the discovery science work delineating myeloid cell biology to explore therapeutic avenues in GBM. She received numerous awards including NIH-R37 award (2023), CRI-CLIP (2021) and Andrew Sabin Award (2021) for high risk-high impact research for emerging leaders.

    Ezo Gruyters, PhD

    AstraZeneca


    Ezo is Vice-President, Head of External R&D and Strategic Alliances, Oncology R&D, establishing collaborations and engaging with external experts to drive innovation forward and accelerate the delivery of our next wave therapeutics. 

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    Prior to joining MedImmune/AstraZeneca, she worked in biotech and pharmaceutical industries such as Immunex/Amgen and Seattle Genetics, Merck and Celgene initially focusing her efforts on the discovery and validation of novel therapeutic targets in inflammation and oncology. She then moved on to develop novel and biosimilar therapeutics in a variety of solid tumors and hematologic malignancies including ADCETRIS, KEYTRUDA, VIDAZA, ONUREG and LUMOXITI.  Dr. Oflazoglu-Gruyters received her B.S. degree in Biological Sciences from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey and her Ph.D. in the field of Immunology from Roswell Park Cancer Institute, State University of New York at Buffalo. Ezo has over 25 years of research and industry experience in the field of Tumor immunology, Biologics, IO, ADCs and Cell therapy.

    Parameswaran Hari, MD

    Obsidian Therapeutics


    Parameswaran Hari, MD, MS, has significant experience designing, managing and leading complex cell and gene therapy clinical programs, including TIL therapies. 

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    He currently serves as the Chief Development Officer of Obsidian Therapeutics. Previously, he was Senior Vice President, Clinical Science at Iovance Biotherapeutics, where he led solid tumor adoptive cell therapy programs across multiple tumor types and indications, including new IND submission, first in human phase 1 studies and BLA submission efforts. Prior to that,  Dr. Hari was the Chief of Hematology and Oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where he led national cooperative multi-PI trial groups in cell and gene therapy and multiple myeloma. He also served the American Society of Transplantation and Cellular Therapy (ASTCT) as its secretary.

    Priti Hegde, PhD

    Kite Pharma


    Priti Hegde is SVP and global head of Research at Kite Pharma a Gilead company, with a focus on developing novel engineered cellular therapies for diseases including Cancer and inflammatory diseases. 

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    From 2019 to 2023, Priti was Chief Scientific Officer at Foundation Medicine, a Roche company, where she led research and development of molecular diagnostic tools for Cancer. Prior to that, Priti spent over a decade at Genentech where she led the Cancer Immunotherapy translational program. Prior to Genentech, she led the transcriptomics organization at GSK. Priti received her post doctoral training in Human Genomics at The Institute for Genomics Research and her PhD in Biochemical Pharmacology from SUNY at Buffalo. Priti serves as a member of board of directors at Adaptimmune and has been on the scientific advisory board of Bolt Therapeutics.

    Rachel Humphrey, MD

    Normunity, Inc.


    Rachel Humphrey has over 25 years of experience in clinical drug development, particularly in the field of cancer treatments and immunotherapies. 

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    Currently she serves as President and Founding CEO of Normunity, a Boston-based biotech focused on immune-oncology. Highlights of her career include leading the development of multiple blockbuster cancer therapies:  the CTLA-4 inhibiting immunotherapy Yervoy® (ipilimumab) at BMS, the PD-L1 inhibiting immunotherapy Imfinzi® (durvalumab) at AstraZeneca, and the kinase inhibitor cancer drug Nexavar® (sorafenib) at Bayer. After working at these big pharmaceutical companies, Rachel took her drug development expertise to emerging biotech companies, where she served in the role of Chief Medical Officer at Black Diamond Therapeutics, CytomX Therapeutics and Mirati Therapeutics, respectively. She previously served on the Board of Directors of CytomX Therapeutics and Xilio Therapeutics, respectively, and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Pyxis Therapeutics and Sporos Bioventures. Rachel started her career as an oncology fellow and staff physician at the National Cancer Institute. She received her training in internal medicine at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, her MD from Case Western Reserve Medical School, and her BA from Harvard University.

    Elizabeth Jaffee, MD, FAIO

    Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins University


    Dr. Jaffee is an internationally recognized expert in cancer immunology and pancreatic cancer.  

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    She is Deputy Director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, Co-Director of the Skip Viragh Pancreatic Cancer Center and Associate Director of the Bloomberg Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.  Her research focus is on developing novel immunotherapies for the treatment and prevention of pancreatic cancer.  Dr. Jaffee is a Past President of AACR. She has served on a number of committees at the National Cancer Institute, including the co-chair of the Biden Moonshot Blue Ribbon Panel which identified high impact research priorities for the NCI.  She currently serves as Chief Medical Advisor to the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research.  She is the inaugural director of the Convergence Institute for Integrating Technologies and Computational Sciences at Johns Hopkins.  Dr. Jaffee is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the SITC Academy of Immuno-Oncology and a Fellow of the AACR Academy. Most recently, she was appointed as chair of President Biden’s Cancer Panel.

    Nikhil Joshi, PhD

    Yale University School of Medicine


    Dr. Joshi is an associate professor of Immunobiology in the Yale University School of Medicine. 

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    Dr. Joshi runs a research laboratory that uses genetically engineered mouse models to study the fundamentals of the T cell response against tumors.

    Johanna Kaufmann, PhD

    Deck Bio


    Johanna Kaufmann, PhD, is a scientific leader in immuno-oncology with broad expertise across preclinical and translational drug development, a strategic department head, and a passionate company builder. 

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    She is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Deck Bio, an early-stage immune-oncology start-up in Cambridge, MA. Before joining Deck Bio, she serves as Executive Vice President of Oncology and Immunology at Codagenix, establishing the utility of their platform technology in the Oncology space. She previously was a Scientific Director at GSK, leading an immune biology group and supporting progression of multiple portfolio assets as part of the immuno-oncology senior leadership team. Dr. Kaufmann joined GSK through the acquisition of TESARO, where she led mechanisms of action studies for multiple immuno-oncology assets. She started her industry career at Genocea Biosciences, where she headed three preclinical herpes virus vaccine programs. Dr. Kaufmann earned a MS in Molecular Medicine from Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany, and a PhD in Cancer Virology from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and Heidelberg University, Germany.

    Lewis Lanier, PhD

    The University of California, San Francisco


    Lewis L. Lanier is an American Cancer Society Professor and J. Michael Bishop MD Distinguished Professor Emeritus. 

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    Dr. Lanier received his B.S. in Biology from Virginia Tech and Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from UNC – Chapel Hill. After postdoctoral studies, he joined the R&D Department at the Becton Dickinson Monoclonal Center, advancing to Associate Director.  In 1990, he joined the DNAX Research Institute, where he advanced to Director of Immunobiology, and in 1999 joined the faculty of UCSF.  His research group studies Natural Killer cells, which recognize and eliminate cells that have become transformed or infected by viruses. In recognition of his contributions he was awarded the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic Tumor Immunology from the Cancer Research Institute (2002), received the Rose Payne Award for contributions to the field of Immunogenetics by the American Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics (2005), was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (2010), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011).  He served as President of the American Association of Immunologists (2006-2007), received the AAI Excellence in Mentoring Award in 2017, and awarded the  AAI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.

    David Liu, MD, MPH, MS

    Dana-Farber Cancer Institute


    Dr. Liu is a medical oncologist and computational biologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate at the Broad Institute. 

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    He received a BA in Economics and MS in Computer Science at Stanford University and was a software engineer and data analyst at Amazon.com before changing careers and going into medicine, receiving his MD and MPH from Johns Hopkins. He did his residency training at Johns Hopkins Hospital, hematology/medical oncology fellowship at DFCI/Harvard CancerCare, and postdoctoral training in Dr. Eliezer Van Allen’s lab. His lab studies tumor evolution and heterogeneity, and Dr. Liu has published and presented on drivers of therapy response and resistance across multiple tumor types and therapies, with a focus on melanoma and immunotherapy. His lab is interested in understanding the drivers of clinical heterogeneity at multiple scales, utilizing the diversity and richness of molecular and clinical data increasingly available and developing approaches to integrate clinical oncology, cancer biology, and computational biology.

    Francesco Marincola, MD

    Sonata Therapeutics


    Franco Marincola is the Chief Scientific Officer of Sonata Therapeutics. Franco brings over 30 years of research and development experience in immunology, oncology and cell therapy to Sonata.

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    Most recently, Franco served as Senior Vice President and Global Head of Research at Kite Pharma where he led the research organization to identify novel therapies for hematologic malignancies and solid tumors. Prior to Kite, he was President and Chief Scientific Officer at Refuge Biotechnologies, where he developed research strategies for adoptive cell therapy products and led therapeutic programs based on nuclease deactivated CRISPR circuits. Prior to Refuge, Franco was Distinguished Research Fellow in Immune Oncology at AbbVie, and Chief Research Officer at Sidra Medical and Research Centre.
    Before joining the biopharma industry, Franco spent more than two decades at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Cancer Institute (NCI), most recently as a tenured senior investigator in cancer immunotherapy and biomarker research and as Chief Infectious Disease and Immunogenetics Investigator at the NIH Clinical Center. 
    Franco is the former President of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC). He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief for multiple peer-reviewed publications, including Journal of Translational Medicine, Translational Medicine Communications, and Immunotherapy, and is the author of more than 600 peer-reviewed publications.
    Franco received his M.D. from the University of Milan and completed his residency at Stanford University.

    Pablo Martinez, MD, PhD

    Amgen


    Pablo Martinez specializes in oncology drug development with a focus on thoracic oncology, translational research and immunology. 

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    He earned his MD degree in Spain where we trained as a resident in clinical oncology at Hospital Vall d’Hebron (Barcelona) with a focus in clinical drug development. For his PhD he worked in the characterization on ALK positive lung cancers pioneering the use of immunohistochemistry for diagnosis. In 2016 he moved to Boston, MA where he worked with Dr Pasi Janne and Dr Geoffrey Oxnard at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute studying resistance mechanisms to ALK inhibitors. After that he has worked in drug development in the pharmaceutical industry. He currently works for Amgen and has led the team responsible for the tarlatamab trials in small cell lung cancer. Dr. Martinez has authored over 50 indexed publications.

    Andy Minn, MD, PhD

    University of Pennsylvania


    Dr. Minn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology and Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. 

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    He received his MD and PhD from the University of Chicago, and finished his residency in radiation oncology and his post-doctoral training at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. His laboratory is focused on understanding how cancers acquire treatment resistance to both conventional therapies and to immunotherapies, and how resistance can be overcome. His lab has identified pattern recognition receptors (PRR) and interferon (IFN) signaling pathways across multiple cancer types. These pathways are typically associated with pathogen infection; however, in the context of cancer, endogenous nucleic acids can mimic viral infection. As a consequence, ensuing anti-viral responses can orchestrate tumor progression, response to conventional therapies and immunotherapies, and immunosuppression. Therefore, the lab is investigating how PRR/IFN signaling is activated in cancer, both cell intrinsically and through the tumor microenvironment, and its significance. These PRR/IFN pathways can be therapeutically exploited to modulate the immune system. One way is through activation of the DNA damage response. An overarching goal is to translate mechanistic findings to better inform the design of clinical trials.

    Golnaz Morad, DDS, PhD

    The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center


    Dr. Golnaz Morad is an NIH/NCI Ruth Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and a member of the SITC Early Career Scientist Committee. 

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    Through basic and translational research, she aims to understand the early mechanisms underlying tumor metastasis, in particular the spread of tumor cells to the brain. She conducted her PhD studies at Harvard University under the supervision of Dr. Marsha Moses, where she studied the role of extracellular vesicles in breast cancer brain metastasis development. Currently, in the laboratory of Dr. Jennifer Wargo, she is studying the role of the microbiome in brain metastasis formation, with the goal of translating her findings into minimally invasive diagnostic and therapeutic strategies.

    Daniel Powell, PhD

    University of Pennsylvania


    Dr. Daniel Powell Jr. is the Scientific Director of Immunotherapy in the Division of Gynecologic Oncology at the University of Pennsylvania and an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.

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    Dr. Powell also is a member of the Department of Defense’s Ovarian Cancer Academy, and serves as the Director of Education for the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy program at Penn. Dr. Powell serves on various foundation and industry advisory boards as well as grant review committees, including the NIH Cancer Immunopathology and Immunotherapy Study Section. Dr. Powell’s research is focused on solid tumor immunobiology and translational immunotherapy. Among his contributions to the field, he is recognized for his role in defining the association between T cell persistence and response to adoptive T cell therapy, the association between T cell differentiation and their persistence after infusion, new biomarkers for tumor-specific tumor infiltrating lymphocytes, and the role of CD27 in human T cell memory formation, as well as the development of novel universal CAR platforms, autologous humanized patient-derived xenograft models, new agents to deplete immunosuppressive cell subsets in vivo, and the first application of CAR T cell therapy in canine cancer. Dr. Powell maintains a research laboratory that continues to develop innovative immunotherapeutic strategies, with an increasing focus on public neoantigen targeting, gene-engineered TIL therapeutics, next-generation universal CAR T cell products, biomarker discovery, targeted disruption of the tumor microenvironment, and novel combination strategies for the treatment of a variety of malignancies.  
    Dr. Powell has participated in SITC-associated programs for nearly two decades and has been a member since its renaming in 2010. His service to the Society includes roles on SITC’s Annual Meeting Session Organizing Committee (2013-2014); Membership Committee (2015-present); Stakeholders Advisory Council for Immunotherapy Education & Outreach (Member & Vice Chair, 2016-present); Joint SITC-FOCIS Symposium (Organizer, 2020-2021); SITC Sparkathon (Mentor, 2018); SITC Representative to FITCancer-5 (Madrid, Spain, 2018); Education and Training Committee (Member, 2018-2022); Cancer Immunotherapy Winter School (Organizer, 2021-2022) and Chair of SITC’s Education and Training Committee for 2023-2024.

    Jeffrey Rathmell, PhD

    Vanderbilt University Medical Center


    Dr. Jeffrey Rathmell studies T cells in autoimmune or inflammatory diseases and cancer with a focus on metabolic mechanisms that regulate lymphocyte fate and function.  

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    He has an interdisciplinary research program using genetic and biochemical approaches to discover immunometabolic mechanisms that drive these immune-related diseases.  He received his PhD in Immunology at Stanford University and performed postdoctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania prior to beginning as faculty at Duke University and subsequently Vanderbilt University Medical Center. In this time, he showed that lymphocyte metabolism is dynamically regulated and his was the first group to show that each T cell subset adopts a specific metabolic program that can be targeted to modulate cell function and fate. These changes point to mechanisms of disease and offer new therapeutic targets in a variety of immune-related diseases. He joined Vanderbilt in 2015 to found and direct the Vanderbilt Center for Immunobiology and is leader for the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center Program in Host-Tumor Interactions.  His awards include Scholar of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Bernard Osher Fellow of the American Asthma Foundation, and William Paul Distinguished Innovator of the Lupus Research Alliance.  

    Yvonne Saenger, MD

    Montefiore Einstein Comprehensive Cancer Center


    Dr. Yvonne Saenger is an immunologist and medical oncologist with research interests in melanoma and liver cancer. 

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    She is an associate professor of oncology, pathology, and microbiology & immunology at the Montefiore Enstein Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Saenger’s NCI funded laboratory’s research is centered on the development of digital pathology based immune biomarkers in cancer with a focus on pairing clinical data with characterization of biopsy specimens. The premise underlying this work is that combining spatial information with genomic information can yield critical information about the phenotypes of immune cells, specifically T cells and macrophages, within the tumor immune microenvironment and that this has implications for patient care. As scientific director of the Immune Monitoring Core at the Albert Einstein Cancer Center, Dr. Saenger am active in multiple collaborative projects evaluating the tumor immune micro-environment in tumors.

    Emmett Schmidt, MD, PhD

    Merck


    Dr. Schmidt is Vice President of Clinical Development in clinical oncology at Merck & Co., Inc. and head of the External Collaborations Product Development Team. 

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    Emmett joined the company in 2011 as a senior principal scientist in clinical oncology, with clinical assignments for early development of multiple signal transduction inhibitors. In 2013, Dr. Schmidt moved to late-stage development and joined the pembrolizumab team, taking on key responsibilities for initial pembrolizumab filing activities as well as developing pivotal studies in adjuvant melanoma and first-line head and neck cancer. In 2014 he was appointed to lead the External Collaborations PDT; the team has since developed more than 300 company collaborations evaluating Pembrolizumab combination therapies with more than 200 different compounds addressing more than 170 different targets.

    Prior to joining Merck, Dr. Schmidt was a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Emmett was a founding member of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. Dr. Schmidt holds M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Duke University and earned both his A.B. and M.A in biology from Harvard University.

    Arlene Sharp, MD, PhD, FAIO

    Harvard Medical School


    Arlene Sharpe, MD, PhD is the Kolokotrones University Professor at Harvard University and Chair of the Department of Immunology at Harvard Medical School. 

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    She is a Member of the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Leader of the Cancer Immunology Program at Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, and Vice Director of the Gene Lay Institute of Immunology and Inflammation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School.

    Dr. Sharpe earned her MD and PhD from Harvard Medical School and completed her residency in Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. A leader in T cell costimulation, her laboratory discovered and elucidated functions of T cell costimulatory pathways, including immunoinhibitory functions of the CTLA-4 and PD-1 pathways, which laid the foundation for immune checkpoint blockade therapy in cancer. Today her laboratory investigates the roles of T cell costimulatory pathways in regulating T cell tolerance, antimicrobial and antitumor immunity, and translating this understanding into therapies for autoimmune diseases and cancer.

    Dr. Sharpe has published over 400 papers and was listed by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate as one of the most Highly Cited Researchers (top 1%) in 2014-2023 and a 2016 Citation Laureate. She received the 2014 William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology, the 2017 Warren Alpert Foundation Prize, the 2020 SITC Smalley Award, and the 2023 Switzer Prize. In 2022, she received the FASEB Excellence in Science Lifetime Achievement Award, AAI Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Rous-Whipple Award from the American Society for Investigative Pathology. Dr. Sharpe received the 2024 Harrington Prize for Innovation in Medicine. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as a Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research, National Academy of Inventors, the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer, and the American Association of Immunologists.

    Michael Surace, PhD

    AstraZeneca


    Michael Surace is a scientist at AstraZeneca, where he is responsible for the design, optimization, and validation of multiplex IF panels, as well as imaging and image analysis approaches specifically for the discovery of complex predictive and prognostic biomarkers for immune oncology.

    Sarah Warren, PhD

    Gilead Sciences


    Sarah Warren is the Senior Director of Business Development at Cell Therapy Search and Evaluation at Gilead Sciences. 

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    Before her current role, she was the Senior Director of Research Tools and Business Development Planning at Kite Pharma, a Gilead company, where she supported the development of next-generation cell therapies. Sarah also serves on the board of directors for the Society of Immunotherapy of Cancer. She was a founder and director of research at Oncofactor Corp, a biotech startup focused on developing therapeutics that targeted novel immune checkpoints. Sarah has a PhD in immunology from the University of Washington and performed her graduate work at the Institute for Systems Biology.

    Drew Wilfahrt, PhD

    University of Pittsburgh


    Drew Wilfahrt is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the laboratory of Greg Delgoffe at the University of Pittsburgh. 

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    Drew was born and raised in Watertown, South Dakota, and obtained his undergraduate degree in Biology from Saint John's University. During his time as an undergraduate, Drew was introduced and immediately transfixed by the field of immunology. He completed his PhD training in Immunology the Mayo Clinic in 2021, where his thesis work focused on the regulation of cholesterol metabolism in T cells during activation.

    In the Delgoffe lab, Drew continues to learn about immunometabolism in the context of tumor immunology. Drew is obsessed with the idea that epigenetic marks are, at their core, just metabolites attached to histones. His work in the Delgoffe lab examines the relationship between nutrient availability and heritable changes in T cell effector functions. Since T cells must perform effector functions in many different tissue microenvironments, he believes it is critical to understand how T cells respond to acute metabolic stress, and characterize the long-term effects of metabolic stress. His work focuses on the nutrient milieu of the tumor microenvironment, which is as a notoriously stressful nutrient environment that impairs T cell functions, and is a major hurdle for current treatment strategies.

    Christopher Johnston, PhD

    The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center


    Christopher D. Johnston is an Associate Professor in the Department of Genomic Medicine, and Director of Microbial Genomics within the Platform for Innovative Microbiome and Translational Research (PRIME-TR) at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center. He completed his primary degree in Applied Biosciences and his PhD in Molecular Microbiology at Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland. 

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    His postdoctoral education was performed at Forsyth Institute, Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease, Cambridge, MA, where he also established his independent laboratory in 2017.

    His research centers on the genetics and epigenetics of tumor-infiltrating microbiota within gastrointestinal tract cancers. The long-term goal of this research is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities of bacteria within tumors, elucidate the underlying mechanisms driving their behavior, and utilize this knowledge to engineer innovative therapeutics and advanced microbe-based technologies for cancer prevention and treatment. 

    To achieve this, his lab employs cutting-edge bacterial omics techniques (including pangenomics, pan-epigenomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics) to generate hypotheses centered on understanding how specific microbes migrate to, colonize, and persist within human tumors. They then utilize synthetic microbiology principles to develop genetic systems for these tumor-associated microbes, to experimentally test and refine these hypotheses using in-vitro and pre-clinical models of disease. Using knowledge gained, with translational collaborators, he aims to harness the innate abilities of tumor-infiltrating microbes to access recalcitrant areas of the tumor microenvironment and engineer them as effective delivery vehicles for therapeutic payloads.

    Michelle Williams, PhD

    University of Pittsburgh


    My love for science began as a high school student in the Pittsburgh area when I participated in the University of Pittsburgh Phagehunting Program organized by the lab of Dr. Graham Hatfull. 

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    I continued to pursue research opportunities during my undergraduate career at Allegheny College that cultivated a passion for cancer research and honed my overall career goal to reduce cancer mortalities by better understanding the mechanisms supporting therapy resistance and metastasis. I completed my Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University (VU) in the lab of Dr. Rebecca Cook. My research tested the effects of Mcl-1, a cell death inhibitor, on luminal breast cancer therapy resistance. My postdoctoral projects conducted in the lab of Dr. Jennifer Richer at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (CU AMC) melded my previous expertise in breast cancer biology with tumor immunology by testing the effects of metastatic breast cancer cells on immune suppression via secreted factors, focusing on cytokines and metabolites. This work laid the foundation for the current research projects in the lab that are assessing the impact of tumor cell signaling and metabolism on the microenvironment of breast cancer liver metastasis.

    Throughout my scientific journey, I've also dedicated my time to mentorship and leadership activities. As a postdoc, I cultivated working relationships with clinicians and patient advocates who have strongly influenced the goals of my research program. Outside of the lab, I enjoy spending time reading a good book, Irish dancing, hiking, or biking.

    Ryan Sullivan, MD

    Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center


    Dr. Ryan Sullivan is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Associate Director of the Melanoma Program and a member of the Termeer Center for Targeted Therapy at Mass General Cancer Center. 

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    Dr. Sullivan is an active clinical and translational investigator whose main areas of interest are the development of novel molecular targeted and immunotherapeutic combinations for malignant melanoma and other solid tumors. More recently, he has been interested in describing, predicting, and optimally treating immune related adverse events from immune checkpoint inhibition.

    Zachary Cooper, PhD

    AstraZeneca


    Dr. Zachary Cooper is a Senior Director of External R&D at AstraZeneca with substantial experience in tumor immunology, the tumor microenvironment and biomarker analysis in clinical samples and trials.  

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    At AstraZeneca, Dr. Cooper currently drives external collaborations and alliances that extend across the portfolio and the translational strategy for a variety of first time in human trials for immune-oncology including the adenosine pathway (CD73 and CD39) and the first in class ADC targeting B7-H4 (AZD8205). Before joining AstraZeneca, Dr. Cooper was an Assistant Professor at MD Anderson Cancer Center with a dual appointment in Surgical Oncology and Genomic Medicine where he led Dr. Jennifer Wargo’s translational melanoma lab exploring the genomic, immunologic and microbial mechanisms of response and resistance to targeted and immune checkpoint therapies.  At MD Anderson, he was also the co-leader of the MD Anderson Melanoma Moonshot Co-Clinical Trial Platform which accelerates the in vivo preclinical evaluation of drugs to position them for success in early-stage clinical trials in specific patient populations. He completed his PhD in Molecular Medicine at University of Maryland as well as postdoctoral fellowships at Brown University and then Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital. Zac has authored over 80 manuscripts including those in Science, Nature, Cell, Lancet Oncology, Cancer Discovery, Cancer Cell, and others.

    Guy Clifton, MD

    Incendia Therapuetics


    Academic Surgical Oncologist.

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    His postdoctoral education was performed at Forsyth Institute, Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease, Cambridge, MA, where he also established his independent laboratory in 2017.

    His research centers on the genetics and epigenetics of tumor-infiltrating microbiota within gastrointestinal tract cancers. The long-term goal of this research is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities of bacteria within tumors, elucidate the underlying mechanisms driving their behavior, and utilize this knowledge to engineer innovative therapeutics and advanced microbe-based technologies for cancer prevention and treatment. 

    To achieve this, his lab employs cutting-edge bacterial omics techniques (including pangenomics, pan-epigenomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics) to generate hypotheses centered on understanding how specific microbes migrate to, colonize, and persist within human tumors. They then utilize synthetic microbiology principles to develop genetic systems for these tumor-associated microbes, to experimentally test and refine these hypotheses using in-vitro and pre-clinical models of disease. Using knowledge gained, with translational collaborators, he aims to harness the innate abilities of tumor-infiltrating microbes to access recalcitrant areas of the tumor microenvironment and engineer them as effective delivery vehicles for therapeutic payloads.

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