SPEAKERS
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INTRODUCTORY SPEAKERS |
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University Health Network |
Dr. Bradly Wouters is an internationally recognized leader and cancer researcher. He became Executive Vice President of Science and Research at UHN in 2016 and prior to that served as the Interim Director of Research at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre since 2014. He joined UHN in 2008 as Senior Scientist and Director of the Princess Margaret Hypoxia Program, and has held faculty appointments at the University of Toronto in the Department of Medical Biophysics and the Department of Radiation Oncology since that time. Prior to joining UHN, Dr. Wouters was Professor and Head of Experimental Radiation Oncology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. As EVP of Science and Research, Dr. Wouters is focused on creating an environment that incentivizes, facilitates, and rewards excellence in basic, translational, and clinical research across all elements of UHN. |
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Dr. Keith Stewart University Health Network |
Dr. Stewart received his medical degree at Aberdeen University Medical School and trained in internal medicine and hematology in Glasgow, Kingston, Toronto and Boston. In 2002, he completed a Master of Business Administration at the Ivey Business School, University of Western Ontario. Dr. Stewart has served in several healthcare leadership roles across both research and clinical practice in Toronto and at the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Stewart returned to Toronto from the Mayo Clinic where he most recently was Director of the Center for Individualized Medicine. Dr. Stewart’s own research and clinical practice is focused on the biology, genomics and treatment of Multiple Myeloma. He has published over 350 research papers and led numerous clinical trials of novel therapeutics for this disease from first in man to large practice changing studies. Dr. Stewart has served on the advisory and medical or scientific boards of many private and public institutions including currently as a non-executive board member of Genomics England. |
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SESSION CHAIRS
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Dr. Erica Tsang Princess Margaret Cancer Centre |
Dr. Erica Tsang is a GI medical oncologist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. She completed her Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology training at the University of British Columbia, followed by further training in GI and early phase oncology at the University of California San Francisco. She also completed a Masters of Public Health at Harvard University. Her research interests involve genomics and clinical trials, with a focus on pancreatic cancer. |
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Dr. Haeseong Park Dana-Farber Cancer Institute |
Haeseong Park, MD, MPH, is a gastrointestinal medical oncologist and clinical investigator at the Gastrointestinal Cancer Center and Center for Cancer Therapeutic Innovation at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. She has served as the Co-Director for Developmental Therapeutics Program at the Siteman Cancer Center at Washington University in St. Louis before recently joining faculty at DFCI. Her research focus is on early phase clinical trials for which she completed an advanced fellowship at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Park’s clinical practice includes treatment of patients with gastric and esophageal cancers. |
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Dr. Abi Vijenthira Princess Margaret Cancer Centre |
Abi Vijenthira MD SM FRCPC is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto and staff hematologist in the Division of Medical Oncology and Hematology at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Dr. Vijenthira received her medical degree from the University of Ottawa and completed her Internal Medicine and Hematology residencies at the University of Toronto. She completed fellowships in Lymphoma at Princess Margaret and in CLL at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and a Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology at Harvard University. Dr. Vijenthira’s clinical practice involves the treatment of patients with lymphomas. Her research interests include population-based outcomes and health services research, and immune and microbiome alterations in patients with hematologic malignancies. |
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Dr. Pamela Ohashi Princess Margaret Cancer Centre |
Dr. Ohashi received her Ph.D from the University of Toronto with Dr. Tak Mak, and did her post-doctoral training at the University of Zurich with the Nobel Laureate Dr. Zinkernagel, and Dr. Hans Hengartner. She is a Senior Scientist and Co-Director of the Tumor Immunotherapy Program at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, and a Professor in the Department of Immunology at the University of Toronto. Her interests include understanding CD8+ T cell biology and mechanisms that regulate anti-tumor immunity. |
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KEYNOTE SPEAKERS |
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Dr. Vinod Balachandran Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre |
Vinod P. Balachandran, MD, completed his undergraduate work in Physics at Cornell University, his MD at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, general surgery residency at Weill Cornell’s NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, and fellowship training in surgical oncology at MSK. In 2015, Dr. Balachandran joined MSK as faculty, where he is now an Assistant Member of the Immuno-Oncology Service of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program (HOPP), an Assistant Attending Hepatopancreatobiliary Surgeon in the Department of Surgery, and Member of the Rubenstein Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research. His clinical and laboratory focus is to discover new immunotherapies for pancreatic cancer. His approach is to study a highly rare subgroup of pancreatic cancer patients that, remarkably, survive long-term. His aim is to discover the underlying immunological principles at play in these patients, and to translate these principles into new clinical immunotherapies. |
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Dr. Loretta Nastoupil, MD MD Anderson Cancer Center |
Loretta J. Nastoupil, MD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Lymphoma/Myeloma at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX USA. Dr. Nastoupil received her medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and completed her internal medicine training at Washington University and hematology/medical oncology fellowship at Emory University. She is currently Deputy Chair of the Lymphoma/Myeloma Department and Section Chief of the indolent lymphoma and new drug development teams which are in line with her research interests of designing and conducting prospective trials aimed at exploiting the immune system to eradicate B-cell lymphoma. She is also interested in real world evidence and has been involved in exploring outcomes among patients treated with standard of care CAR T cell therapy. |
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CANCER GENOMICS SESSION SPEAKERS |
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Princess Margaret Cancer Centre |
Dr. Gaiti is an early career investigator at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto, and Early Career Research Affiliate at OICR. He earned his PhD in evolutionary biology and genomics from the University of Queensland (Australia) in 2017, where he focused on understanding the evolutionary origin of two major players in human gene regulation: long non-coding RNAs and chromatin marks. As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Dan Landau at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York Genome Center, he studied the epigenetic determinants of cancer evolution using novel single-cell multi-omics experimental and computational approaches in blood disorders and brain tumors. These works have been published in highly esteemed journals including Nature, Nature Genetics, and Nature Communications. His work has been further recognized by prestigious grants (NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00), CIHR Project Grant) and awards, including the Emerging Leaders in Computational Oncology Award and the Ontario Institute Cancer Research Investigator Award. Dr. Gaiti research program is focused on developing and applying single-cell multi-omics approaches to answer the fundamental question of how malignant cellular states are jointly determined by genetic and epigenetic alterations, aiming to develop novel therapeutic strategies to directly anticipate and address cancer evolutionary capacity. |
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Vancouver Prostate Centre |
Dr. Wyatt is an associate professor in Urologic Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a senior research scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre and also cross-appointed at BC Cancer. Dr. Wyatt has a DPhil in genetics from the University of Oxford. His research goals are to identify associations between genomic alterations and patient outcomes in metastatic prostate and bladder cancer, and to translate these findings into clinical biomarkers. Dr. Wyatt has developed novel laboratory and computational techniques to study plasma circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA). Through application of these methods to clinical trial cohorts, his team has demonstrated that ctDNA is highly representative of metastatic lesions, and that somatic alterations detected in ctDNA can help predict prostate cancer therapy resistance or response. |
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Dr. Anna Spreafico, MD, PhD Princess Margaret Cancer Centre |
Dr. Spreafico is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto and Clinician Investigator in the Division of Medical Oncology and Hematology at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network, Toronto, Canada. Her previous training includes a PhD in translational research in the Program for Evaluation of Targeted Therapies at the University of Colorado, USA, and a subspecialty fellowship in experimental therapeutics at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Dr. Spreafico serves as the Head and Neck Medical Oncology Disease Site Lead and Director of the Phase I Drug Development Fellowship at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Dr. Spreafico is a member of the CCTG Head and Neck Disease site Executive Committee. She serves on the US NCI Head and Neck Cancer Steering Committee rare tumor task force, and she is the Co-Chair of the NRG Oncology Recurrent/Metastatic H&N Cancer Working Group. Dr. Spreafico's full-time academic practice and research include early phase clinical trials, with disease-specific interests in skin/melanoma, and head and neck cancers. Her translational research focuses on immuno-oncology-based, microbiome and cancer interception-driven studies and she leads as PI, CCTG, NRG and NCI CTEP early phase investigator-initiated clinical trials. |
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Dr. George Zogopoulos McGill University |
George Zogopoulos, MD (Toronto), PhD (McGill), FRCS(C), FACS is an Associate Professor of Surgery and Oncology at McGill University, a staff surgeon at the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), and scientist at the Research Institute of the MUHC and the Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Institute. He is a senior clinical research scholar of the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Santé, with a translational research program studying the genetics and oncogenomics of pancreaticobiliary cancers. His clinical practice focuses on the surgical treatment of pancreatic, biliary and hepatic malignancies as well as abdominal organ transplantation with an interest in transplant oncology. |
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TUMOR IMMUNOTHERAPY SESSION SPEAKERS |
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Dr. Logan Walsh, PhD McGill University |
Dr. Walsh did his postdoctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and is now an Assistant Professor at the Goodman Cancer Institute and Department of Human Genetics at McGill University. He currently holds the Rosalind Goodman Chair in Lung Cancer Research. Dr. Walsh’s lab is very technology focused, and uses spatial proteomics combined with artificial intelligence to help develop personalized medicine strategies for cancer patients. His recent work involves understanding the tumour immune microenvironment and how we can leverage spatial information from routine pathology sections to better understand cancer progression and response to immunotherapy. |
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Dr. Andy Minn, MD, PhD University of Pennsylvania |
Andy Minn is a Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology and the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also Director of the Mark Foundation Center for Immunotherapy, Immune Signaling, and Radiation at Penn. Dr. Minn received his MD and PhD from the University of Chicago where he studied the structure, function, and regulation of programmed cell death genes with Dr. Craig Thompson. He then did his medical residency in radiation oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. There, he also did his post-doctoral training with Dr. Joan Massague, studying genes that control tissue-specific metastasis. |
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CLOSING REMARKS |
Dr. Bradly Wouters
Dr. Federico Gaiti, PhD
Dr. Alexander Wyatt, PhD
