Keynote Speakers

Michel Sadelain
Center for Cell Engineering, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York
Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, is the Director of the Center for Cell Engineering and the incumbent of the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Chair at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He is a Member of the Immunology Program and the Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics. Dr. Sadelain’s research focuses on human cell engineering and cell therapy to treat cancer and hereditary blood disorders. His laboratory has made several seminal contributions to the field of chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), from their conceptualization and optimization to their clinical translation for cancer immunotherapy. His group was the first to publish dramatic molecular remissions in patients with chemorefractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia following treatment with autologous CD19-targeted T cells. Dr. Sadelain is the recipient of the Cancer Research Institute’s Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor Immunology, the Sultan Bin Khalifa International Award for Innovative Medical Research on Thalassemia, the NYPLA Inventor of the Year award, the Passano award and the Pasteur-Weizmann award. He previously served on the NIH Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee and as President of the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy.
Louis Staudt
Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, NIH, Bethesda
Dr. Staudt received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1976, graduating Cum Laude in Biochemistry. He was awarded a Medical Scientist Training Program fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees in 1982. His Ph.D. thesis in the field of immunology, performed in the laboratory of Walter Gerhard, revealed somatic hypermutation as a mechanism of rapid antibody diversification during normal immune responses. Following Internal Medicine training, he joined Nobel Laureate David Baltimore’s laboratory at the Whitehead Institute as a Jane Coffin Childs Fellow. There he cloned and characterized the first tissue specific transcription factor, Oct-2. He established his laboratory in the Metabolism Branch, National Cancer Institute (NCI) in 1988 and is currently Co-Chief of the NCI Lymphoid Malignancies Branch. He is also Director of the NCI Center for Cancer Genomics, which oversees several large-scale managed programs studying the genomic aberrations in cancer. In 2011, Dr. Staudt was given the honorary title of NIH Distinguished Investigator. Dr. Staudt serves on the Editorial Boards of Cancer Cell and the Journal of Experimental Medicine. He has received numerous awards for his research, including the 2009 Dameshek Prize from the American Society of Hematology for outstanding contribution in hematology and election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013. Dr. Staudt’s laboratory uses genomics to improve the diagnosis and treatment of lymphomas.



Speakers

  • Anna BIGAS (Institut Hospital del Mar d'Investigacions Mèdiques (IMIM), Barcelona)
  • Meinrad BUSSLINGER (Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna)
  • Manel ESTELLER (Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC) and ICREA, Barcelona)
  • Adolfo FERRANDO (Institute for Cancer Genetics, Columbia University, New York)
  • Guillermo GARCIA-MANERO (University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston)
  • Thomas GRAF (Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Barcelona)
  • Jose Angel MARTINEZ-CLIMENT (Center for Applied Medical Research, University of Navarra, Pamplona)
  • Maria-Victoria MATEOS (University Hospital Salamanca, Salamanca)
  • Ari MELNICK (Weill Cornell Medicine, New York)
  • Pablo MENENDEZ (Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC) and ICREA, Barcelona)
  • Matthias MERKENSCHLAGER (MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences, Imperial College London, London)
  • Miguel Angel PIRIS (Fundación Jimenez Díaz, Madrid)
  • Christoph PLASS (German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg)
  • Felipe PROSPER (Center for Applied Medical Research, University of Navarra, Pamplona)
  • Almudena RAMIRO (Spanish National Center for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC), Madrid)
  • Veronika SEXL (Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Vienna)
  • Mazyar SHADMAN (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, University of Washington, Seattle)
  • Reiner SIEBERT (Institute of Human Genetics and Ulm University Medical Center, Ulm)
  • Henk STUNNENBERG (Radboud University, Nijmegen)