SPEAKERS

Professor Chris Whitty is Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for England, the UK government’s Chief Medical Adviser and head of the public health profession. Chris is a practising NHS Consultant Physician at University College London Hospitals (UCLH) and the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, and a visiting professor at Gresham College. Chris is an epidemiologist and has undertaken research and worked as a doctor in the UK, Africa and Asia. He was Professor of Public and International Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) before becoming CMO and remains an honorary professor. Chris was the Chief Scientific Adviser for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) from January 2016 to August 2021, with overall responsibility for the department’s research and development, including being head of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the government’s major funder of clinical, public health, social care and translational research. Chris was the interim Government Chief Scientific Adviser from 2017 to 2018, including during the Novichok poisonings. Before that, he was the Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for International Development (DFID), which included leading technical work on the West Africa Ebola outbreak and other international emergencies.

David Crosby is head of prevention and early detection research at Cancer Research UK (CRUK), a fundraising research charity and the world’s second largest non-commercial funder of cancer research, after the US government.  David began life as a baby, before becoming a pharmacologist, completing a PhD studying cell signalling in platelets.  He spent time in academia, lecturing in clinical pharmacology.  He moved into industry, identifying and evaluating new clinical development opportunities for Linde Gas Therapeutics, the world’s largest medical gases company.  He then moved into the public sector, joining the UK government research funding agency, the Medical Research Council, where he oversaw various science areas and research funding programmes (including inflammation, cardiovascular and respiratory research), most recently leading the MRC-NIHR methodology research programme, and MRC’s strategy and investments in experimental medicine.  He is now developing and implementing a new strategy and programme of research investments at CRUK which aims to accelerate progress towards earlier detection and prevention of cancer, through an integrated multidisciplinary approach, driven by improvements in health outcomes.

Dr. Carmen Guerra is the Ruth C. and Raymond G. Perelman Professor of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.  Dr. Guerra is a general internist and cancer equity researcher.  She is also the Vice Chair of Diversity and Inclusion for the Department of Medicine and the Associate Director of Diversity and Outreach for the Abramson Cancer Center.  

Dr. Guerra’s research has focused on developing and evaluating interventions to increase the participation of underrepresented populations in cancer screenings and cancer clinical trials.  She developed and evaluated several cancer screening patient navigation programs and programs to increase participation of Black patients in cancer clinical trials including a Cancer Clinical Trials Ambassador Program and a financial reimbursement program for out-of-pocket costs for patients participating in cancer treatment trials.  

Dr. Guerra serves as the U.S. Deputy Chair for the health equity workgroup of the Multicancer Early Detection Consortium.  Dr. Guerra co-chaired the American Society of Clinical Oncology-Association of Community Cancer Centers workgroups that developed an unconscious bias training specifically for cancer research teams, “Just Ask”; an equity, diversity and inclusion site self-assessment for cancer research teams to identify best practices; and the ASCO-ACCC joint research statement “Increasing Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Cancer Clinical Trials.”  She also is member of the American Cancer Society (ACS) National Board of Directors and a member of the ACS Clinical Guidelines Development group. Dr. Guerra is an author of the ACS colorectal, cervical and HPV clinical practice guidelines which widely influence clinical practice.

Claude Chelala is Prof of Bioinformatics at Barts Cancer Institute. She is co-Lead for the Barts Life Sciences Precision Medicine programme aiming to unlock the longitudinal Electronic Health Record phenotype from multi-dimensional data. She leads the Health Informatics and Bioinformatics for two national biobanks (BCNTB and PCRFTB) creating an ecosystem with interlinking clinical, in vivo, in vitro and in silico resources to provide the analytical means to harness clinical data and molecular findings. Her research in breast cancer focuses on using multimodal data to explore ancestry-associated differences as well as the clinical utility of field cancerisation and imaging free-text reports in predicting cancer recurrence. Her research in pancreatic cancer uses sequential, non-invasive liquid biopsies for tracking tumour dynamics.

Dr. Ghobrial completed her M.D. at Cairo University and a residency in Internal Medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, then trained as a Hematology/Oncology Fellow at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She is currently a Professor of Medicine and the Lavine Family Chair for Preventative Cancer Therapies at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School. She is the Director of Translational Research in the Department of Multiple Myeloma, Director of the Center for Prevention of Progression diseases (CPOP), and co-leader of the Lymphoma and Myeloma Program at Dana-Farber. She is the co-leader of the Stand Up to Cancer Myeloma Dream Team—the first Dream Team award for blood cancer, the recipient of the Claire W. and Richard P. Morse Research Award, the Jan Gosta Waldenstrom Award, and the William Dameshek Prize given annually by The American Society of Hematology (ASH) to an individual, younger than 50 who has made outstanding contributions in hematology.

Her research focuses on identifying and developing effective therapeutic interventions for precursor conditions of myeloma (Monoclonal Gammopathy of Undetermined Significance and Smoldering Multiple Myeloma, MGUS and SMM). The focus of her research is to identify novel biomarkers of disease progression and develop potentially curative therapies in the pre-malignant phase that exploit the immune microenvironment in the bone marrow. She developed a large, patient-empowering observational study for these precursor conditions, the PCROWD study. She is also the PI of the first screening study for multiple myeloma in the US, the PROMISE study, which is currently screening 30,000 high-risk individuals, including those of African descent or with a family history of blood cancer.

Jon Emery is the Herman Professor of Primary Care Cancer Research at the University of Melbourne, and the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre Primary Care Research and Education Lead. He is a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Leadership Fellow, and Director of the Cancer Australia Primary Care Collaborative Cancer Clinical Trials Group (PC4).  

Following his medical training at Cambridge and Oxford, he has followed a career in academic primary care, initially at Oxford, where he obtained his DPhil on cancer risk assessment tools, then as a Cancer Research UK Clinician Scientist at Cambridge before taking up a Chair at the University of Western Australia. He was the Australian leader on the Cancer Research UK international CanTest programme on early cancer diagnosis. 

His research has focused on the application of advances in genetic medicine, primary care oncology and the development and evaluation of complex interventions including computer decision support systems, and new cancer diagnostic and screening technologies. He is currently leading several trials related to risk-based cancer screening in primary care.

Kate Brain is a Professor of Health Psychology in Cardiff University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on behavioural aspects of cancer screening, prevention and early diagnosis, with a particular emphasis on addressing socioeconomic inequality. Since 2015 Kate has led a programme of behavioural science research spanning the Wales Cancer Research Centre and Primary and Emergency Care Research Centre, funded by Health and Care Research Wales. Kate is Associate Director of Population Health in Cardiff University’s College of Biomedical and Life Sciences. She is a member of Cancer Research UK’s Early Detection and Diagnosis Research Committee and advises NHS England on the Targeted Lung Health Check programme. In 2022 Kate joined the Multi-Cancer Early Detection Consortium as UK Deputy Chair of the Health Equity work group.

Larry Kessler, Sc.D. is Professor in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health, University of Washington School of Public Health. He has over 40 years of experience in health services research.  He came to the University of Washington from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration where he served as the director of both the Office of Surveillance and Biometrics and Office of Science and Engineering Laboratories at FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. Prior to that, his work in cancer surveillance with the Applied Research Branch at NCI substantially changed how cancer surveillance is performed, with the addition of the Cancer supplements to the National Health Interview Survey, the SEER-Medicare data system, and the Breast Cancer Screening and Surveillance Consortiums.  He also spent 6 years at the National Institute of Mental Health primarily doing research on the diagnosis and prevalence of mental disorders in primary care. He has an extensive research record in applied health services research with work in cancer, in cancer surveillance research, and regulatory knowledge of medical products, including over 200 peer-reviewed journal publications.  His recent research has broadened this into related fields of comparative effectiveness, patient centered and outcomes research.  His recent work has focused on use of technologies in medical care.  He is currently involved with several randomized trials and observational studies of comparative effectiveness and patient-centered outcomes research. He also has particular research and expertise in diagnostic technologies. He now serves as Deputy Chair of the Multi-Cancer Early Detection Consortium.

Dr Thompson is a Family Physician and clinical researcher whose career over the past 3 decades has spanned the UK and the USA. In the UK he worked as a GP and academic researcher at the University of Oxford where his research was focused on improving diagnostic precision across a number of health care conditions in primary care, including children and adults with serious infections. His research emphasis on diagnostics continued over the last 10 years at the University of Washington (UW), and has expanded to examine use of new diagnostic tests and technologies in ambulatory care settings or by patients themselves, and closing gaps between technology developers and the primary care clinical and research communities. Recent research at the UW has used AI to extract symptom signatures of cancer from routine electronic health record data to identify individuals with possible cancer. He joined Google in 2022 where his research spans a number of technologies including smartphone and wearable sensors and AI, across a range of health conditions globally.

Sam is the Director of Medicine at University College London, a division within the Faculty of Medical Sciences that encompasses 8 departments, over 20 centres and around 100 principal investigators across three campuses. His laboratory research, funded by Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK programme grants focusses on the airways and examines both normal homeostasis and the earliest development of cancer. Major contributions include defining that normal airway homeostasis is governed by stochastic division of basal cell; showing that airways genetically damaged by smoking can resolve on quitting; mapping the molecular architecture of pre-cancerous Squamous cell lesions, and identifying the immunological abnormalities that allow precancerous lesions to progress to cancer. These achievements were recognised with his election to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2021. He is the chief investigator of several trials ranging first-in-man trials of cell and gene therapies emanating from his own lab, to SUMMIT, the largest lung cancer screening trial in Europe recruiting over 13000 people. He works across the University, UCL Hospitals, the UCLH Biomedical Research Centre and interacts closely with industry, again ranging from trial delivery through to venture capital funded drug discovery programmes.

He works as a respiratory consultant at UCLH with a particular interest in lung cancer, mesothelioma, interventional and diagnostic bronchoscopy and early lung cancer detection. He has been Head of UCL Respiratory, Vice-Chair of the National ‘Clinical Expert Group’ on Lung Cancer and the Faculty of Medical Science Vice-Dean of Research at UCL.

Dr. Sapna Syngal, MD, MPH is the Leader of the Cancer Risk, Prevention, and Early Detection Program in the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, Director of Strategic Planning for Prevention and Early Cancer Detection at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Director of Research in the Division of Cancer Genetics and Prevention at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She has established an internationally recognized clinical, research, and educational program devoted to the genetics, early detection and prevention of cancer. 

Dr. Syngal’s research interests began in the field of inherited gastrointestinal cancers, including Lynch syndrome and inherited pancreatic cancer, where her lab has made seminal contributions to identifying new methods of identifying individuals and families at high risk of cancer and screening for cancers at their earliest stages using novel technologies and biomarkers. A related focus of her work has been to increase access to genetic testing, with a focus on increasing testing and cancer screening among disadvantaged populations. She is the developer of the PREMM models, which are widely used for risk assessment for inherited cancer, the founder of the Lynch Syndrome Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Principal Investigator of the GENERATE study, funded as part of a Stand Up 2 Cancer and Lustgarten Foundation Pancreatic Cancer Interception Dream Team project. 

Dr. Syngal has served as part of numerous national and international committees including the US Multi-Society Task Force on Colorectal Cancer, an American Society of Clinical Oncology group that developed the Policy Statement Update on Genetic and Genomic Testing for Cancer Susceptibility, and led the development and publication of the American College of Gastroenterology Clinical Guideline for Genetic Testing and Management of Hereditary Gastrointestinal Cancer Syndromes. She was elected to be a member of the Association of American Physicians in 2018 and the American Society of Clinical Investigation in 2009. She was the recipient of the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Collaborative Group of Americas on Hereditary Colorectal Cancer. As a culmination of her career, Dr. Syngal is now leading efforts across Dana-Farber and the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center to implement a paradigm shift in cancer care, with a focus on taking care of patients with premalignant conditions with interventions that lead to cancer interception.

Yoryos Lyratzopoulos is the foundation professor of cancer epidemiology at University College London, where he leads the ECHO (Epidemiology of Cancer Healthcare & Outcomes) Group. His research aims to contribute to global efforts to control cancer through improved understanding of: a) The risk of underlying cancer in patients who present with new onset symptoms (particularly non-specific symptoms) in primary care; b) Potentially avoidable delays in the diagnosis of symptomatic patients with underlying cancer, and related responsible mechanisms; c) Disparities in cancer diagnosis/detection and treatment, and their origins above/beyond tumour factors; d) Organisational and international variation in diagnostic routes and treatment pathways. To April 2023, he has published 226 research papers, >55% of which as first or last author. Having been awarded the Cancer Research UK Future Leaders Prize (2016), he has represented his cancer epidemiology in the development of NICE’s Suspecting Cancer in Primary Care guidelines (2012-2015), a milestone in early diagnosis policymaking. His research has received citations in key international and national policy documents, including: WHO’s “Report on cancer” (2020); WHO’s Report on the Global Burden of Diagnostic Errors in Primary Care (2016); CRUK’s “Early Detection and Diagnosis Roadmap” (2020); CRUK’s “Cancer in the UK: Socio-economic Deprivation” (2020); The State of the Nation Report on Cancer in the UK (2018); The Lancet Oncology Commission "The Expanding Role of Primary Care in Cancer Control" (2015); The US Institute of Medicine Report Improving Diagnosis in Health Care (2015); and The UK Government’s “Cancer Strategy for England” (2015).

By combining mathematical modeling, statistical analysis, and machine learning, with experimental, epidemiological, and DNA sequencing data, Dr. Tomasetti has provided the first quantitative evidence for the large role in cancer causation played by the normal, i.e. endogenous, accumulation of somatic mutations in the cells of the human body.

As an applied mathematician, he currently leads the effort to develop classification algorithms for the early detection of cancer via a simple blood test.

His work is recognized internationally for his paradigm-shift contributions to the current understanding of cancer etiology and tumor evolution. He has published more than 40 papers, with several leading and corresponding author papers in Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. Altmetric, a data science service that tracks where published research is mentioned online ranked three of his papers — all published in the journal Science — #4, #15, and #22 for the attention they received among any research paper published in any scientific field for the years 2015, 2017, and 2018, respectively.

Dr. Tomasetti holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park (Dec. 2010).

Before joining City of Hope and TGen, he was an Associate Professor of Oncology and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University with appointments in the Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, in both the Department of Oncology (Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center) and the Department of Biostatistics (Bloomberg School of Public Health).

After his Ph.D., he was a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biostatistics of the Harvard School of Public Health and in the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Jan. 2011 – Jun. 2013), after which he became a faculty member at Hopkins.

Clare’s research team focuses on statistical, population and public-health-related analyses to best leverage cancer susceptibility genetics for risk stratification, cancer early diagnosis and prevention. 

She is currently leading three multi-centre CRUK-funded research programs focused on cancer susceptibility gene testing pathways (BRCA-DIRECT), variant interpretation (CanGene-CanVar) and functional inference from high throughput assays (CG-MAVE).  Working with the NHSE Cancer Program she is leading two implementation programs using high-throughput pathways to scale genetic testing in the NHS, including an SBRI-funded initiative for using digital platforms for BRCA-testing in women diagnosed with breast cancer.  She has led genome-wide association studies in breast and testicular cancer, as well as evaluations of polygenic risk prediction in these and other cancers.  She is also an honorary consultant in Public Health Medicine with NHS Digital/NHSE, working together on amalgamation of genomic data from across the national NHS Genomic Laboratory hubs. 

From 2014 to 2020, Clare worked as Clinical Lead for Cancer Genomics for the Genomics England 100,000 Genomes Project.  Having trained as a Clinical Geneticist, her clinical work at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust focuses on management of patients and families with genetic susceptibility to cancer.  

Clare undertook her preclinical training in Cambridge and qualified in medicine from Oxford University.  She completed a Masters degree in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and a PhD in Genetic Epidemiology at the Institute of Cancer Research, London.  

Edward Patz, Jr., M.D. is the James and Alice Chen Distinguished Professor of Radiology and Professor in Pharmacology and Cancer Biology at Duke University. He is a clinician–scientist, with over 200 publications, and has participated in numerous clinical trials including the National Lung Cancer Screening Trial. He is the principal investigator of a basic science laboratory that explores clonal evolution of tumors, biomarkers for early detection, and the role of inflammation in cancer. He is the 2022 recipient of the IASLC lifetime achievement Joseph W. Cullen Prevention/Early Detection Award.

Professor Gilbert, University of Cambridge is an honorary consultant radiologist working in the Cambridge Breast Unit. Her research is focused on technological assessment of new imaging techniques relating to breast cancer and screening.  Previously she evaluated digital breast tomosynthesis and computer aided detection in the breast screening programme and is currently assessing impact of AI. She undertakes research in risk adapted stratified breast screening using Abbreviated MRI, Tomosynthesis, Whole Breast Ultrasound and Contrast Enhanced Mammography. She is working in multimodal functional imaging with MRI and PET to explore the tumour environment using breast cancer as a model and correlating this with the tumour genetic profile.

Since 2012 Professor Gilbert has been awarded fifteen competitive grants worth over £20M. She was a member of grant funding panels - NIHR HTA Board, the EME Board and is on a number of advisory panels. She was a previous associate editor of Clinical Radiology.

Professor Gilbert has over 260 peer reviewed publications, 5 book chapters and numerous conference abstracts.   She is a regular speaker at international Radiology conferences in Chicago and Vienna and was awarded Honorary membership of Radiological Society of North America in 2019, Honorary fellowship of the American College of Radiologists, the Gold Medal from the European Society of Radiology and fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2021 and fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences. She is immediate past President of the European Society of Breast Imaging.

Garth Funston is a GP and Clinical Senior Lecturer in Primary Care Cancer Research at the Wolfson Institute of Population Health. His research focuses on diagnostic test evaluation and the development and validation of prediction models using large healthcare datasets, with the aim of improving cancer detection in primary care and optimising diagnostic pathways.

Following Medical training at St Andrews and Cambridge, Garth undertook clinical academic training in Manchester. He completed a Cancer Research UK funded PhD at the University of Cambridge, which focussed on the detection of ovarian cancer in primary care. He was lead author on the Royal College of General Practitioners Paper of the Year for Clinical Research (2021) and was awarded the World Ovarian Cancer Coalition Transformational Research Prize for his work on ovarian cancer detection.

Garth currently leads a portfolio of charity and government funded studies evaluating diagnostic tests and prediction models for a range of cancers including ovarian, prostate and gastro-intestinal cancer.

Since 2012 Professor Gilbert has been awarded fifteen competitive grants worth over £20M. She was a member of grant funding panels - NIHR HTA Board, the EME Board and is on a number of advisory panels. She was a previous associate editor of Clinical Radiology.

Professor Gilbert has over 260 peer reviewed publications, 5 book chapters and numerous conference abstracts.   She is a regular speaker at international Radiology conferences in Chicago and Vienna and was awarded Honorary membership of Radiological Society of North America in 2019, Honorary fellowship of the American College of Radiologists, the Gold Medal from the European Society of Radiology and fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2021 and fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences. She is immediate past President of the European Society of Breast Imaging.

Laura D. Wood, MD, PhD is an Associate Professor and Director of the Division of Gastrointestinal and Liver Pathology in the Department of Pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is also Co-Leader of the Cancer Invasion and Metastasis Program in the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and Deputy Director of the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center. Dr. Wood received her BS in Biology from the College of William & Mary, graduating Summa Cum Laude with membership in Phi Beta Kappa. She then went on to earn both her MD and PhD from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, with membership in Alpha Omega Alpha. She completed her PhD research in the laboratory of Dr. Bert Vogelstein, where she led the first whole exome sequencing studies in human cancers. Dr. Wood then went on to complete residency in Anatomic Pathology (serving as Chief Resident in her final year) and fellowship in Gastrointestinal and Liver Pathology at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Now, she leads her own translational research laboratory focused on molecular characterization of pancreatic neoplasms. Her laboratory leverages next generation sequencing to characterize genetic heterogeneity and clonal evolution in precancerous pancreatic lesions. In addition, her group employs three-dimensional organoid culture models to interrogate the molecular drivers of pancreatic cancer invasion, and they are developing tools to transform human pancreatic pathology from two to three dimensions. In addition to her research program, Dr. Wood signs out clinical specimens on the Gastrointestinal Pathology service.