SPEAKERS
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INTRODUCTORY SPEAKERS |
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Keith Stewart, MD Princess Margaret Cancer Centre |
Dr. Keith Stewart is Vice President, Cancer at University Health Network and Director of the Princess Margaret Cancer Program. He is Regional Vice-President, Ontario Health (Cancer Care Ontario) and holds the Richard H. Clark Chair in Cancer Medicine. 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 was most recently 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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Bradly G Wouters, PhD 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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SESSION CHAIRS |
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Philippe L Bedard, MD Princess Margaret Cancer Centre |
Dr. Philippe Bedard is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He is a Staff Medical Oncologist in the Division of Medical Oncology and the Fellowship Director for the Bras Drug Development Program at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto. He received his medical degree from the University of Toronto where he was awarded the Cody Academic Silver Medal. He completed his Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology specialty training at the University of Toronto. He received additional training in clinical and translational research at the Breast International Group (BIG) in Brussels, Belgium. He is a board certified fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and the American Board of Internal Medicine. He received a 2012 Career Development Award by the Conquer Cancer Foundation of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the 2017 William E. Rawls Prize from the Canadian Cancer Society. His clinical practice involves the treatment of patients with breast and testicular cancers. He is a principal investigator for a number of ongoing phase I/II clinical trials in breast cancer and other advanced solid malignancies. |
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Scott Bratman, MD, PhD Princess Margaret Cancer Centre |
Dr. Scott Bratman is Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology and Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto and serves as Clinician-Scientist and Staff Radiation Oncologist at The Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Dr. Bratman has co-developed cutting-edge 'liquid biopsy' technologies for detection and monitoring of cancer in the bloodstream. These tools have the potential to revolutionize cancer care by allowing non-invasive diagnosis and novel precision medicine strategies. As a clinician-scientist, Dr. Bratman is at the front lines of translating liquid biopsies and other molecular biomarkers into improved health outcomes for his patients. His research program includes projects on head and neck cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, and cervix cancer. The Bratman Lab is also developing genomic tools for personalized use of radiotherapy. |
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Lillian L Siu, MD Princess Margaret Cancer Centre |
Dr. Lillian Siu is a senior medical oncologist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre since 1998, and has been a Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto since 2009. She is the Director of the Phase I Program and Co-Director of the Bras and Family Drug Development Program at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, and holds the BMO Chair in Precision Genomics (2016-2026). She is also the Clinical Lead for the Tumor Immunotherapy Program at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Dr. Siu served on the Board of Directors for the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) for a four-year term (2012-2016). She also served as a member of the Nomination Committee for the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) (2014-2016). She currently serves on the AACR Board of Directors for a three-year term (2017-2020). Dr. Siu’s major research focus is in the area of new anticancer drug development, particularly with respect to phase I trials and head and neck malignancies. She is the Principal Investigator of a phase I cooperative agreement UM1 award (2014-2019) sponsored by the United States National Cancer Institute. In addition to her active research in early phase clinical trials, she has been leading genomics initiatives and immuno-oncology trials at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Together, the three programs of drug development, cancer genomics and tumor immunotherapy form a triad of synergy that supports the institution’s core vision to deliver precision cancer medicine. |
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KEYNOTE SPEAKERS |
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Deborah Schrag, MD, MPH Dana-Farber Cancer Institute |
Dr.Deborah Schrag, MD, MPH, FASCO is Chief of the Division of Population Sciences at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. She is a health services researcher and gastrointestinal medical oncologist with focus on colorectal cancer. Her research focuses on improving the quality, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of cancer care delivery. She leads the Harvard Program in Cancer Care Delivery Research, is the PI of several multi-center trials and leads efforts to develop data standards to characterize outcomes of cancer treatment at population-scale. She has performed foundational work in patient-reported outcomes and building phenomic data standards to systematically measure outcomes from electronic health records. Dr. Schrag is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association and an elected member of the American Association of Physicians. |
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Emile Voest, MD, PhD Netherlands Cancer Institute |
Dr.Emile Voest is medical director of the Netherlands Cancer Institute, senior scientist of the Oncode Institute, medical oncologist and translational scientist. In addition to his clinical and managerial responsibilities he is leading his own research group. His laboratory group is devoted to bringing personalized medicine to patients and is focused on mechanistic studies and identification of biomarkers that predict treatment efficacy. The results from these studies are subsequently translated in clinical studies. These translational approaches are performed across tumor types with emphasis on epithelial tumors. His research is in the area of personalized medicine consists of large scale genomic sequencing of patients with metastatic cancer, the development of primary cultures of tumors for ex vivo testing (including tumor organoids) and the use of these cultures to improve drug development and to determine which treatment is best for a specific patient. |
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CANCER GENOMICS SESSION SPEAKERS |
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Victor Ling, PhD Terry Fox Research Institute |
Dr. Victor Ling is the founding President and Scientific Director of the Terry Fox Research Institute--involving more than 70 cancer research institutes, hospitals, and universities across Canada (www.tfri.ca). He is a Distinguished Scientist at BC Cancer, Professor of Pathology, and Professor of Biochemistry at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He served previously as Vice President of Research at the BC Cancer and Assistant Dean at UBC. In that capacity he was instrumental in launching in 1998 the Genome Sciences Centre in Vancouver and headed the development of the $90 million BC Cancer Research Centre opened in 2005 that currently is home to over 650 research staff including over 200 trainees. He served on many national and international boards and committees for cancer research. Dr. Ling obtained his undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, PhD in Biochemistry at UBC, and postdoctoral fellowship with the late Frederick Sanger in Cambridge, England. As a scientist, Dr. Ling is best known for his discovery of P-glycoprotein (MDR) associated with multiple drug resistance in cancer, and for the superfamily of ABC transporters. He has been honored by the General Motors Kettering Prize, the Dr Josef Steiner Cancer Research Award, the Gairdner Foundation International Award, the Terry Fox Gold Medal, and many others. He has received the Order of British Columbia, the Order of Canada, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. |
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Sohrab Shah, PhD Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center |
Dr. Sohrab Shah is the Chief of Computational Oncology in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Dr. Shah received a PhD in computer science from the University of British Columbia in 2008 and developed his research program in computational biology at BC Cancer Agency and the University of British Columbia starting in 2010. His research focuses on developing and using computational methods to understand cancer evolution and treatment response. This encompasses advanced machine learning and Bayesian statistical methods to analyze and interpret large-scale datasets in cancer research. At MSK, Dr. Shah is building new and innovative capacity in computational methods across the spectrum of data-intensive research activity. This includes multimodal data integration such as genomics and imaging, high-resolution single-cell genomics, and transcriptomics. His translational focus lies in breast cancer and ovarian cancer, in which he has pioneered discovery of prognostic mutational signatures and large-scale studies of mutational landscapes and evolution of these cancers. Dr. Shah is a former Canada Research Chair, is a Komen Scholar, and holds the Nicholls-Biondi Endowed Chair in Computational Oncology at MSK. |
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Dan Landau, MD, PhD New York Genome Center |
Dr. Dan Landau, MD, PhD, is physician-scientist who integrates data science innovation with genomic technology development to unravel the basic principles of tumor evolution as a key to cancer cure. He gained his MD from Tel Aviv University and summa cum laude PhD in Cancer Biology from Paris Diderot University. He completed a Medicine residency and fellowship in Hematology and Medical Oncology at Yale University, as well as postdoctoral fellowship at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. He now serves as an Associate Prof. of Medicine at the Meyer Cancer Center (WCM), and member of the WCM Institute of Computational Biomedicine, as well as a Core Member of the NYGC. His work received numerous awards including the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists, K01 from the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) NIH initiative, SU2C Innovative Research Grant, and the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. |
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TUMOR IMMUNOTHERAPY SESSION SPEAKERS |
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Kathy McCoy, PhD University of Calgary |
Dr. Kathy McCoy is a Professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, a member of the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases, and the Scientific Director of the International Microbiome Center at the University of Calgary, Canada. Dr. McCoy utilizes germ-free and gnotobiotic models to investigate the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which the microbiome regulates host immunity and physiology. Her research focusses on the dynamic interplay between the gut microbiota and the innate and adaptive immune systems. Her research aims to understand how exposure to intestinal microbes, particularly during early life, educates and regulates the mucosal, systemic and neuronal immune systems and how this can affect susceptibility to diseases, such as allergy, autoimmunity, neurodevelopmental disorders and cancer. Her lab also investigates how the microbiome regulates the immune system throughout life with the aim to identify microbial therapies that can be employed to enhance current therapeutic approaches, such as in cancer. |
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John Hilton, MD Ottawa Health Sciences Center |
Dr. John Hilton is a Clinician Investigator at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (Cancer Therapeutics Program), staff medical oncologist (Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre), and an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Ottawa. He also serves as the Research Lead for Breast Cancer Disease Site as well as the Organizational Lead for the Clinical Trials Office within the Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre. His primary clinical expertise and research focus is to improve clinical care for patients with breast cancer and head and neck cancer, as well as specializing in early drug development for patients with advanced, metastatic disease. |
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Grainne O’Kane, MD Princess Margaret Cancer Centre |
Dr. Grainne O’Kane graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 2007 and went on to complete her general internal medicine residency and oncology training at the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland. While in Ireland, completing her last two years of training, Dr. O'Kane chaired the national trainee committee. She then completed a post-doctoral degree in mismatch repair deficiency and Lynch Syndrome, before commencing her Clinical Research Fellowship at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in January of 2016. Dr. O’Kane completed a two-year fellowship in thoracic and GI malignancies and thereafter focused her research in pancreatic and hepatobiliary tumors during her final fellowship year. Dr. O’Kane is a Clinician Investigator and Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto. She leads a number of clinical trials and main research interests are in biomarker driven clinical trial design and molecular characterization of tumours. |
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CLOSING SPEAKER |
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Pamela Ohashi, PhD Princess Margaret Cancer Centre |
Dr. Pamela 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 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. |
