PLENARY SPEAKERS

Prof. Volker Lauschke

Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Volker Lauschke is Associate Professor and group leader in Personalized Medicine and Drug Development as well as Director of the Microfluidics Facility at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. His research group is interested in the genetic basis of inter-ethnic and inter-individual variability in drug disposition and toxicity with a focus on assessing the impact of rare genetic variants and develops artificial intelligence tools to improve personalized pharmacological therapy. Furthermore, the lab uses 3D cell culture systems of primary human cells, microfluidics and integrative bioinformatics approaches to predict drug toxicity and to identify novel therapeutic strategies for complex metabolic diseases. V.L. is a Board member of the Swedish Society of Medicine and an Oversea Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. In addition, he is co-founder and CEO of HepaPredict AB, a biotech company offering evaluations of drug metabolism and safety as well as drug target validations based on a novel microphysiological 3D spheroid culture platform.

Talk title: How to Consider Rare Genetic Variants in ADME genes for Personalized Drug Therapy?

Prof. Nikolaus Rajewsky

Max-Delbrück-Centrum für Molekulare Medizin, Berlin, Germany

More information to come. 

Talk title: Single-cell analyses reveals principles of gene expression in space, time, and during disease.

Prof. Elvira Bramon

University College London, UK

Elvira Bramon is Professor of Neuroscience and Mental Health at UCL. She heads the Neuroscience Research Department at the UCL Division of Psychiatry. She is interested in the genetics and pharmacogenetics of severe mental disorders. After her medical degree (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and her training in psychiatry (Hospital Universitari Mútua de Terrassa), she did her PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry Psychology and Neuroscience (King’s College London). She leads the Psychosis Endophenotypes International Consortium investigating EEG, cognitive and clinical biomarkers for psychosis and their genetic influences. Elvira is a member of the Genomics England Pharmacogenetics Working Group, developing a new genomic medicine programme for the UK’s National Health Service. She is a Consultant Psychiatrist in a rehabilitation service for people with complex mental health needs. Elvira has published more than 120 scientific papers, some in Nature, Nature Genetics, Biological Psychiatry, Molecular Psychiatry… These international charities and funders are supporting Elvira’s research: The Wellcome Trust, UK’s Medical Research Council, UK-NIHR, NARSAD, Mental Health Research UK and EU-Horizon 2020.

Talk title: Pharmacogenomics and Psychiatric Disorders 

Prof. Karine Clément

Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, Paris, France

Prof. Karine Clément is full professor of Nutrition, Nutrition department, Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital and at Sorbonnes university in Paris. From 2011 to 2016, she was the director of the Center of Excellence ICAN Institute de CardiometAbolism and Nutrition, dedicated to innovative Care, Research and training in the field of Cardiology and metabolic diseases. Inside the Institute, KC’s team (INSERM/university team NutriOmics) is working on the pathophysiology of obesity adressing the altered interorgan cross-talks in this complex disease using genetics and functional genomics approaches. She performed a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University, CA, USA where she acquired competencies in gene profiling approaches applied to complex diseases (1999-2000) and in 2001 she obtained a young INSERM “Avenir” team focused on the characterization of patterns of gene expression induced by environmental perturbations. KC’s INSERM/university research team (NutriOmics Nutrition and obesity Systemic approaches) has been involved in genetic and functional genomics aspects of human obesity. Her work led to the identification of monogenic forms of obesity (Leptin receptor and MC4R mutations) and today patients suffering from these diseases benefit from new targeted treatments. Using functional approaches in commoner forms of obesity, her team showed notably that inflammatory and remodeling genes in different metabolic tissues are modulated by weight variation in parallel to immune cell accumulation changes. Deeper insight into mechanisms was undertaken. Her team is currently exploring the link between environment changes, immune systemic changes and functional modifications in the adipose tissue. The gut microbiota is of evidence a key actor of this link and explorations of this organ is deeply undertaken. KC contributed to more than 300 international publications, reviews and many international conferences in the field. She is a member and expert of several national and international scientific committees or science advisory boards in obesity and metabolism and contributes to several European Networks in genetics and functional genomics (Nugenob, Diogenes, Hepadip, ADAPT, FLIP, ePOS and recently coordinates METACARDIS a European program dedicated to the study of gut microbiota in cardiometabolic disorders www.metacardis.eu).

Talk title: Gut Microbiota Dysbiosis in Human Obesity: Impact of Bariatric Surgery

Prof. Doug Easton

University of Cambridge, UK

Professor Douglas Easton is a leading genetic epidemiologist with a specific interest in the genetics of hormone related cancers. His studies have been instrumental in the characterisation of many cancer susceptibility genes, including BRCA1, BRCA2, CHEK2 and ATM, and the identification of more than 200 common cancer susceptibility variants.
In 2007 he led the first genome-wide association study in breast cancer. Professor Easton leads the Breast Cancer Association Consortium, a collaboration involving more than 100 research groups and 300,000 subjects. He leads the EMBRACE cohort study of BRCA1/2 mutation carriers, and initiated the BOADICEA risk prediction model, used in genetic counselling worldwide.

Talk title: Precision Medicine and Breast Cancer

Dr. Naveed Ishaque

Berliner Institut für Gesundheitsforschung (BIG) BIH Zentrum für Digitale Gesundheit, Berlin, Germany

Naveed Ishaque is group leader at the Digital Health Centre at the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) in Berlin, Germany. Before starting his Ph.D, Naveed undertook a Bachelor’s degree in Computing and a Master’s in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, both at Imperial College London. He then undertook his Ph.D. work under Professor Jonathan Jones at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, focusing on application of next generation sequencing to elucidate molecular genetics determining host-pathogen interactions. Realising the potential of high-throughput omics profiling for better understanding human disease, Naveed moved to the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ) in Heidelberg to undertake his postdoctoral research under Professor Roland Eils, after which he later became the bioinformatics group leader for the Heidelberg Institute of Personalized Oncology (DKFZ-HIPO). Naveed currently leads the Computational Oncology research group at the Digitial Health Centre at the Berlin Institute of Health and the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, where the groups interest lies in understanding the basis of biological heterogeneity using computational approaches applied to ‘omics data in a disease context with a strong focus on precision medicine in cancer.

Talk title: Digital Health: Challenges for Research and Future Medicine

Prof. Stefan Endres

University München, Clinical Pharmacology, Germany

Stefan Endres is Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and director of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at the University Hospitals of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Munich, Germany. He studied Biochemistry at Harvard University (B. A. 1979) and Medicine at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He is a board-certified internist, gastroenterologist and clinical pharmacologist. His field of research is immunopharmacology with a specific focus on the immunotherapy of cancer. On this topic he has conducted preclinical and clinical studies. Amongst other, he is member of the Data Monitoring and Safety Board (DMSB) of an ongoing clinical study of immunotherapy of hepatocellular carcinoma. Since 2007 Stefan Endres is Dean of Research of the Medical Faculty of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and also Member of the Board of Directors (Aufsichtsrat) of the University Hospitals of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. In 2011 he was Visiting Professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass. He is member of the Ethics Committee of the Physicians’ Board of the State of Bavaria (Bayerische Landesärztekammer).

Talk title: Chemokines as tools and targets for personalized cancer immunotherapy

Prof. Henk Jan Guchelaar

Leiden University Medical Center, Netherlands

Henk-Jan Guchelaar studied Pharmacy at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RuG) and specialized as a hospital pharmacist and clinical pharmacologist. Since 2003, he is employed as a clinical pharmacist and clinical pharmacologist and professor of clinical pharmacy and chair of the department of Clinical Pharmacy & Toxicology at Leiden University Medical Center.

Since october 2008, he is also appointed professor of Clinical Pharmacy at the Faculty of Science, Leiden Academic Center for Drug Research, University Leiden and chair of the Leiden University focus area ‘Translational Drug Discovery and Development’.

Pharmaceutical patientcare in oncology is his main area of clinical interest. He is program leader of the research program ‘Personalised Therapeutics’ investigating interindividual variability of drug response with an emphasis on pharmacogenomics. He is founder and board member of the Leiden Network for Personalised Therapeutics (www.lnpt.nl). He is (co-)author of more than 500 (Web of Science indexed) articles (Pubmed: 360) in international peer reviewed scientific journals, more than 100 articles in Dutch journals and 20 (chapters in) books.

From 2010-2016 he was a member of the national Central Committee on Research Involving Human Subjects, from 2003-2017, he was vice-chair of the Dutch Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Biopharmacy, and since 2016 he is member of the Dutch Medicines Evaluation Board. Since 2017, he is member of Council for Medical Sciences of the Royal Dutch Academy of Science. Henk-Jan is founder of the new Master of Pharmacy, Leiden University Medical Center, University of Leiden.

Talk title:  Implementation of Pharmacogenomics in Clinical Practice

Prof. Manel Esteller

University of Barcelona, Spain

More information to come. 

Talk title: Clinical epigenetics: seizing opportunities for translation

Prof. Muzlifah Haniffa

Newcastle University, UK

Muzlifah Haniffa is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, Lister Institute
Research Fellow and Consultant Dermatologist based in Newcastle University.  She
graduated from medical school in Cardiff and trained as a junior doctor in
Cambridge.  She received her dermatology specialist training in Newcastle.  She
was awarded an Action Medical Research Training Fellowship and a Wellcome Trust
Clinical Intermediate Fellowship.  Muzz was the recipient of the LEO Pharma/ESDR
Silver Prize for Dermatology Research (2013) and the ACTERIA Prize in
Immunology and Allergology (2018). Her research programme aims to understand
the functional organisation of the developing and adult human immune system in
health and disease.

Title talk: Single Cell Sequencing and Precision Medicine 

Prof. Martin Hrabe de Angelis

Helmholtz Zentrum München, Munich, Germany

More information to come. 

Talk title: Systemic standardized metabolic phenotyping of mouse models: perspectives for precision medicine

Prof. Klaus Pantel

UKE University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany

Prof Pantel is Chairman of the Institute of Tumour Biology at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. The institute is part of the Centre of Experimental Medicine and the University Cancer Center Hamburg (UCCH). Prof Pantel graduated in 1986 from Cologne University in Germany and completed his thesis on mathematical modelling of haematopoiesis in 1987. After his postdoctoral period in the USA on hematopoietic stem cell regulation (Wayne State University, Detroit), he performed research at the Institute of Immunology, University of Munich for 10 years. The pioneer work of Prof Pantel in the field of cancer micrometastasis, circulating tumor cells and circulating nucleic acids (ctDNA, microRNAs) is reflected by more than 500 publications in excellent high ranking biomedical and scientific journals (incl. NEJM, Lancet, Nature Journals, Cancer Cell, Science Translational Medicine, Cancer Discovery, PNAS, JCO, JNCI, Cancer Res.) and has been awarded the AACR Outstanding Investigator Award 2010, German Cancer Award 2010, and two ERC Advanced Investigator Grants 2011 and 2019. Moreover, Prof Pantel coordinates the European IMI consortium CANCER-ID (www.cancer-id.eu) on blood-based “Liquid Biopsies” in lung and breast cancer comprising 37 partner institutions from academia, non-profit organizations and industry.

Talk title: Liquid biopsy in the era precision medicine

Dr. Jun J. Yang

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, USA

Dr. Jun J. Yang received his PhD in Pharmacology from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He then completed his postdoctoral training in pharmacogenetics of antileukemic agents at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Dr. Yang joined the St. Jude faculty in 2010 and is currently a Member Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Department of Oncology and the Hematological Malignancies Program of St. Jude Comprehensive Cancer Center. His research program focuses on genomics-guided precision medicine for pediatric cancers, especially the pharmacogenetics of adverse drug effects and its clinical implementation. With childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) as a model disease, his group is a leader in using genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to discover genetic risk variants related to a variety of leukemia treatment response and toxicity phenotypes, many of which have direct clinical relevance, as described in his publications in JAMA, Nat Genet, Lancet Oncology, J Natl Cancer Inst, J Clin Oncol etc. Dr. Yang’s group is part of the National Institutes of Health Pharmacogenomics Research Network and he serves as the Co-leader of the Center for Precision Medicine in Leukemia. He is the recipient of the American Society of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics Young Investigator Award and the American Society of Hematology Scholar Award. Dr. Yang is a member of the Children’s Oncology Group.

Talk title: NUDT15 polymorphisms alter thiopurine metabolism and hematopoietic toxicity

Prof. Michael Zimmermann

EMBL Heidelberg

Michael Zimmermann is a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. Michael received a Bachelor’s degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Basel University and a Master’s degree in Biotechnology from the Ecole Superiérieur en Biotechnologie in Strasbourg. He worked with Dr. Michael Fischbach and Prof. Jon Clardy at Harvard University and UC San Francisco studying secondary metabolism of human-associated microbes. He subsequently performed his Ph.D. work with Prof. Uwe Sauer at ETH Zurich, where he developed metabolomics and Systems Biology approaches to study microbial metabolism in the context of host-pathogen interactions. For his postdoctoral training, Michael joined Prof. Andrew Goodman’s group at Yale University to study the molecular mechanisms of host-microbiome interactions. Michael’s most recent research investigates how the human gut microbiome contributes to drug metabolism, which can result in interpersonal variation of patients’ drug response and toxicity. His group employs bacterial genetics, metabolomics, gnotobiotic mouse work, and mathematical modeling to systematically map microbial drug transformations and to quantitatively separate microbial and host drug metabolism in vivo.

Talk title: Identifying gut microbiome contributions to drug metabolism

Dr. Mathias Wilhelm

Technical University of Munich, Germany

Mathias Wilhelm is a trained bioinformatician but generally intrigued by all mechanisms which require a good understanding of mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. Initially working in the field of metabolomics, he spend the last 7 years of his scientific career focusing on studying the life-cycle of proteins using mass spectrometry. Today, he leads a small group of bioinformaticians at the Chair of Proteomics and Bioanalytics (Prof. Bernhard Kuster, Technical University Munich) and is interested in supporting wet-lab scientists by developing tools for data analysis, integration, interpretation and dissemination. In addition, he is a co-founder of OmicScouts GmbH and MSAID GmbH, both providing services in the field of mass spectromtery-based proteomics.

Talk title: Deep learning to assist the identification of neoantigens.

Prof. Ewan Pearson

Division of Public Health and Genomics, School of Medicine, University of Dundee, UK

Ewan Pearson is Professor of Diabetic Medicine at the University of Dundee, Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Honorary Consultant in Diabetes and Endocrinology at Ninewells Hospital and Medical School in Dundee. In the School of Medicine, he is the Head of Division for Population Health and Genomics and the Director of the Dundee Clinical Academic Track.

Professor Pearson obtained his medical degree from the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, UK. He undertook a Wellcome Trust Clinical Training fellowship with Prof Andrew Hattersley at the University of Exeter Medical School, UK and completed his PhD in the physiology and treatment of monogenic diabetes. He then moved to Dundee where he was supported by a Chief Scientist Office Clinician Scientist fellowship and, more recently, by a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award. Over the last ten years in Dundee his research interests have been in the phenotypic and genotypic determinants of drug response in diabetes, and in stratified approaches to the management of diabetes. He leads the IMI-DIRECT project on stratification in type 2 diabetes and is strand 2 lead on the ABPI-MRC funded MASTERMIND project. Ewan has been awarded the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh Croom Lecture, an EASD Rising Star award, the Diabetes UK RD Lawrence Lecture and the EASD Minkowski Award for his work in these areas.

Talk title: Precision Medicine treatment of Diabetes

PD Dr. Ursula Amstutz

University of Bern, Switzerland

Ursula Amstutz is a Research Group Leader at the University Institute of Clinical Chemistry, Inselspital Bern University Hospital and University of Bern, Switzerland. She received training in biology, population genetics and biomedical sciences at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where she obtained an MSc in Biology and a PhD in Cellular and Biomedical Sciences. She performed postdoctoral research in pharmacogenomics and drug safety and effectiveness research at the University of British Columbia and the BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, Canada, and with the Canadian Pharmacogenomics Network for Drug Safety (CPNDS). In 2016, she obtained the venia docendi (Habilitation) at the Medical Faculty of the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her current research focuses on uncovering the genetic basis of severe adverse drug reactions and the analysis of cell-free DNA as a minimally-invasive method to detect and quantify somatic genetic variation in patients in solid organ transplant recipients and in patients with cancer.

Talk title: Genotype-guided fluoropyrimidine dosing: ready for implementation

Prof. German Ott

Robert-Bosch-Krankenhaus, Stuttgart, Germany

Biographical sketch:

• 4/2007-present: Professor of Pathology, Head of the Department of Clinical Pathology, Robert-Bosch-Krankenhaus, Stuttgart, Germany
• 11/2006-3/2007 Full Professor, Cytopathology and Tumor Genetics at the Institute of Pathology, University of Würzburg, Germany (Chair: Prof. Dr. H.K. Müller-Hermelink)
• 4/1998-11/2006: Staff Pathologist and Associate Professor at the Institute of Pathology, University of Würzburg, Germany (Chair: Prof. Dr. H.K. Müller-Hermelink)
• 4/1990-4/1998: Postdoctoral Fellow and Pathologist in training at the Institute of Pathology, University of Würzburg, Germany (Chair: Prof. Dr. H.K. Müller-Hermelink)
• 6/1988-3/1990: Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Pathology, Technical University of Aachen, Germany (Chair: Prof. Dr. Ch. Mittermayer)

Research Topics:

Dr. Ott is a general pathologist with a special interest in Haematopathology. His field of research is morphology, cytogenetics and molecular genetics in malignant tumors with special reference to Non-Hodgkin lymphomas, their genetic basis, risk stratification and prognostication

Talk title: Aggressive Lymphomas: The Road to Precision Medicine

Prof. Superti-Furga

CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine, Austria

Giulio Superti-Furga, Ph.D, Orcid number 0000-0002-0570-1768, full genome: PGA-1 (www.genomaustria.at) is CEO and Scientific Director of CeMM, the Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (www.cemm.at) and Professor of Medical Systems Biology at the Medical University of Vienna. He was trained as a molecular biologist at the University of Zurich, Genentech, IMP Vienna and EMBL Heidelberg. He co-founded five biotech companies, obtained four ERC grants and has published more than 200 papers. CeMM, that he directs since 2005, is located in the middle of the large general hospital campus in Vienna, where, together with some 180 scientists and medical doctors he is trying to bring the genomic and systems-views close to the clinical world to improve medical practice. For CeMM, he promoted a unique mode of super-cooperation, connecting biology with medicine, experiments with computation, discovery with translation, and science with society and the arts. Recent interests include ways to create functional precision medicine approaches and the role of the human transportome in pathophysiology and drug discovery.

Talk title: Recent advances in combinatorial drug screening and synergy scoring