International Conference on Cellular Immunotherapy in Pediatric Oncology (CIPO)

John Anderson, MBBS, PhD
UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health

John Anderson is Professor of Experimental Paediatric Oncology at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and Honorary consultant paediatric oncology at Great Ormond Street Hospital London. He graduated in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford and in Medicine from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He trained in paediatrics and paediatric oncology in London and completed his PhD in cancer biology at the Institute of Cancer Research, Sutton UK in 1998. Since then, he has been a group leader at the UCL Institute of Child Health. Since around 2005, his research group’ focus has been on childhood solid cancer immunology and immunotherapy with a particular interest in translating early findings into clinical trials, through T cell engineering and T cell adoptive immunotherapy. He works in several collaborative research and clinical collaborative groups including the SIOPEN neuroblastoma trials network, the UK Children’s Cancer and Leukaemia Group and the ITCC solid tumour committee. 

Melissa Berrien-Elliott, PhD
Saint Louis University School of Medicine

Melissa Berrien-Elliott, PhD, is a translational immunologist with an interest in understanding how natural killer (NK) cells can be used to treat cancer. She received her Ph.D. in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology from Saint Louis University School of Medicine in 2014. She joined the Fehniger Lab at Washinton University School of Medicine as a post-doctoral scholar where she became an expert in NK cell biology, immunotherapy, and translational immunology. She has recently started her own group at Saint Louis University studying the immune crosstalk between NK cell therapy and the tumor microenvironment.

Marie Bleakley, MD, PhD, MMSC
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center

Marie Bleakley, MD, PhD, MMSC, is a transplantation and cellular therapy physician scientist who leads a laboratory and clinical research team at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. The research team focuses on the development and evaluation of T cell immunotherapy and graft engineering strategies for hematologic disorders and pediatric cancers. Although hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HCT) reduces relapse of acute leukemia compared to chemotherapy alone, relapse after HCT still occurs in approximately 30% of HCT recipients and is generally fatal. T cells targeting leukemia-associated minor histocompatibility (H) antigens to prevent or treat relapse are being developed and evaluated in clinical trials, such as HA-1 TCR T cell therapy developed by Dr. Bleakley’s team (PMID: 29051183). Dr. Bleakley will discuss TCR-T cell therapy for the management of post-HCT relapse and share some data from the phase 1 clinical trial of HA-1 TCR T cell therapy for the treatment of post-HCT relapse (NCT03326921). 

Catherine M. Bollard, MBChB, MD
Children’s National Hospital

Catherine M. Bollard, MBChB, MD, received her medical degree at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. She is board certified both in pediatrics and hematology. She is currently the Bosworth Chair for Cancer Biology, Director of the Center for Cancer and Immunology Research, and Director of the Program for Cell Enhancement and Technologies for Immunotherapy (CETI) at Children’s National Hospital. She is a Professor of Pediatrics and of Microbiology, Immunology, and Tropical Medicine at George Washington University and the Associate Center Director for Translational Research and Innovation at the GW Cancer Center. Dr. Bollard is a past president of the International Society for Cellular Therapy, the current President of the Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy and is Editor in Chief of Blood Advances. Her bench and translational research focuses on the development of novel cell therapies for cancer and virus-associated diseases.

Yvonne Chen, PhD
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Yvonne Chen, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics at UCLA. She is the co-director of the Tumor Immunology program in the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA, and a member researcher of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. The Chen Laboratory applies biomolecular engineering techniques to the development of novel mammalian-cell systems for clinical use, and Dr. Chen led the first investigator-sponsored clinical trial on CAR-T cell therapy at UCLA. The Chen Lab’s work has been recognized by the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Mark Foundation Emerging Leader Award, and the Cancer Research Institute Lloyd J. Old STAR Award, among others. Prior to joining UCLA in 2013, Yvonne was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. Yvonne received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

Hongbo Chi, PhD
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Hongbo Chi, PhD, is Member and Robert G. Webster Endowed Chair in Immunology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Dr. Chi has made fundamental discoveries in immunometabolism by establishing metabolic reprogramming of immune cell fate. His laboratory ushered in the concept of metabolic reprogramming in immunology, revealed the critical roles of mTOR and nutrient signaling, and brought systems biology and functional genomics to immunometabolism field. Among the highlights of recent work, his laboratory has established metabolic adaptation and nutrient rewiring of T cell and dendritic cell subsets and applied in vivo CRISPR screening and other systems tools to reconstruct metabolic signaling and gene regulatory networks and identify new therapeutic targets in cancer and other diseases. His work is highly regarded and widely referenced, earning him a place on the 2020–2022 Highly Cited Researchers lists. He has recently received an NIAID R37 merit award and an NCI R35 outstanding investigator award.

Weiguo Cui, PhD
Northwestern University

Dr. Cui studies the differentiation, function, and epigenetic regulation of T cells in various inflammatory settings, including acute and chronic viral infections, autoimmune disorders, and cancer. T cells are members of the adaptive immune system and are critical for defense against bacteria, viruses, and malignant cells. Using cutting-edge technology, such as single cell RNA-, TCR- and ATAC sequencing, multi-color flow cytometry, and transgenic mouse models, Dr. Cui’s lab aims to better understand how T cells respond to different antigenic and inflammatory stimuli in their ability to control viral infection and cancer. One of the major research interests of Dr. Cui’s group is to dissect cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate T cell functional exhaustion. Ultimately, he aims to develop new ways to reverse T cell exhaustion in treating chronic viral infection and cancer.

Rebecca Gardner, MD
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Rebecca Gardner, MD, has focused her research efforts on the development and implementation of CAR T cell therapies for pediatric malignancies, with a specific focus on leukemia and lymphoma. She is interested in how to augment CAR T cell therapy to provide more durable remissions while also decreasing rates of severe toxicities. Over the last several years she has also been involved in efforts to streamline the infrastructure needed to implement cell therapies, including the development of pharmacovigilance programs for the academic sponsor as well as onboarding of commercial products.

Sara Ghorashian, MD, PhD, FRCPath
UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health

Sara Ghorashian, MD, PhD, FRCPath, led the bench to bedside development of AUTO1 i.e. fast off-rate CD19 Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cells for therapy of paediatric ALL. AUTO1 is now licensed to Autolus Ltd and is the subject of a licensing study in adults. Dr. Ghorashian’s UCL research group focuses on T-cell immunobiology related to CAR T cell fitness and the development/optimisation of CAR immunotherapies for AML and ALL including multi-antigenic targeting. She is scientific lead for a first-in-man triple CAR targeting study in AML developed in her group.

Stephen Gottschalk, MD
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Stephen Gottschalk, MD, is the Chair of the Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital. He is a physician scientist, who is interested in hematopoietic cell transplantation and cancer immunotherapy. His current research focuses on the development of cell-based immunotherapies for pediatric cancers. He is actively conducting investigator-initiated early phase clinical studies with conventional and genetically modified immune cells. In the laboratory, he is overseeing a team of researchers, who focus on overcoming current limitations of cell therapies for cancer by using genetic approaches and other biotherapeutics. For his contributions to the field of cellular immunotherapy, he was inducted into the American Society of Clinical Investigation.

Andras Heczey, MD
Texas Children’s Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine

Andras Heczey, MD, is a physician-scientist in the Division of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at Baylor College of Medicine. His initial work focused on the evaluation of human CAR NKT cells and their first-in-human Phase 1 testing leading to the identification of BTG1 as a novel mediator of NKT and T cell exhaustion. His team designed glypican-3-CARs (GPC3-CARs), systematically tested these receptors in T cells to optimize costimulatory signals and further enhanced the antitumor properties of GPC3-CAR T cells through TCF1 maintenance by interleukin-15 and -21 co-expression. The findings of this work provided the foundation of four Phase 1 clinical studies in adults and children GPC3+ solid tumors.

Helen Heslop, MD
Baylor College of Medicine

Helen Heslop, MD, is Dan L. Duncan Chair, Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics and Director of the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston Methodist Hospital and Texas Children’s Hospital. Additionally, she holds the role of the Deputy Director of the Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor College of Medicine

Dr. Heslop is a physician scientist engaged in translational research focusing on adoptive immunotherapy with gene-modified effector cells, to improve hemopoietic stem cell transplantation and cancer therapy. An additional focus in reconstituting antiviral immunity post-transplant. She therefore has extensive experience in developing and conducting transplant studies and cell and gene therapy studies and currently holds over 20 INDs. 

She serves as Principal Investigator on several peer-reviewed research programs, including an NCI-funded SPORE in lymphoma and the Meg Vosberg Stand Up to Cancer Dream Team in T cell lymphoma. She is also the principal investigator on an NHLBI-funded training grant in Cell and Gene Therapy. She is a past President of the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT), the American Society of Blood and Marrow Transplant (ASBMT) and the Foundation for Accreditation of Cell Therapy (FACT) and the past chair of the BMT CTN Steering Committee. She is an elected member of the American Association of Physicians and the National Academy of Medicine.

Rosie Kaplan, MD
National Cancer Institute

Rosie Kaplan, MD, is a clinician and translational researcher in the Pediatric Oncology Branch of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Dr. Kaplan is a pioneer in the field of tumor microenvironment and metastasis. She first characterized the pre-metastatic niche – the earliest events in distant tissue sites including stromal activation, matrix remodeling and myeloid mediated immune suppression that are essential for cancer metastasis. She conducts research aimed at developing new immune and microenvironment modulating therapies for treatment and prevention of metastatic disease. Her research focuses on microenvironmental changes that regulate metastatic progression. Her clinical expertise lies in the areas of clinical trials and solid tumor malignancies. 

She was elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigators (2022) and received the AACR Team Science Award in 2021. In 2021, her work on "Development of Genetically Engineered Myeloid (GEMy) Cell Therapy for Cancer Metastasis” was selected in 2021 for the National Cancer Institute Innovation Award.

Javed Khan, MD
National Institutes of Health

Javed Khan, MD, is the Deputy Chief of the Genetics Branch and Head of the Oncogenomics Section, at NCI. His group applies next-generation sequencing (NGS) including whole genome, exome, RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, single cell NGS, and proteomics to investigate high-risk, refractory, or relapsed pediatric malignancies, and translates these findings to the clinic. He has utilized machine learning tools, such as artificial neural networks, to identify diagnostic and prognostic patterns. He was among the first to use integrated genomics for real-time genome-guided therapies for children with cancer. He is a Co-PI of TARGET neuroblastoma, Children’s Oncology Group-NCI NGS project for rhabdomyosarcoma, and was an investigator on the Stand Up to Cancer St. Baldrick’s Immunogenomics Dream Team. He has published over 190 peer-reviewed manuscripts. His group is developing T-cell therapies against pediatric cancers, with a planned trial targeting FGFR4. He holds a Physician's License and is board-certified in Pediatrics and Pediatric Hematology and Oncology.

Giedre Krenciute, PhD
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Dr. Giedre Krenciute received her PhD at Baylor College of Medicine where she also completed her postdoc training under the mentorship of Dr. Stephen Gottschalk. After two years as an instructor at St. Jude, Dr. Krenciute was promoted to faculty in 2019. She developed and characterized chimeric antigen receptors specific to brain tumors and has made several key contributions to improve our understanding of CAR T cell function. In 2021, Dr. Krenciute was awarded the Emerging Scientist Award from the Children’s Cancer Research Fund. She also demonstrates remarkable commitment to mentoring, developing the potential of her trainees, and junior scientists.

Gavin Lindberg
The EVAN Foundation

Gavin Lindberg is President and Co-Founder of the Evan's Victory Against Neuroblastoma Foundation. Based in Maryland and established in 2011, The EVAN Foundation is a non-profit organization founded in memory of Gavin's only child who passed away from neuroblastoma in 2010 at the age of 7. The Foundation supports childhood cancer research, patient and survivor wellness programs, and advocacy & education initiatives. Gavin and his wife Wendy are also outspoken advocates for improved end-of-life care for terminally ill children and their families.

In addition to his work with The EVAN Foundation, Gavin serves as a patient advocate on the National Cancer Institute’s Pediatric Immunotherapy Discovery and Development Network, the NCI’s Pediatric & Adolescent Solid Tumor Steering Committee, the New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) Research Consortium, the Cancer Grand Challenges award-winning NexTGen Pediatric Team, and the St. Baldrick’s Foundation Empowering Pediatric Immunotherapies for Childhood Cancer (EPICC) Team.

Franco Locatelli, MD, PhD
IRCCS Bambino Gesu Children’s Hospital

Franco Locatelli is a Full Professor of Pediatrics at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome and Head of the Department of Paediatric Haematology and Oncology and Cell and Gene Therapy, at the Bambino Gesù Children’s Hospital in Rome. He has been the President of the Italian Association for Pediatric Haematology-Oncology AIEOP from 2004 to 2006 and served as chairman of the European EWOG-MDS consortium from 2005 to 2011. Professor Locatelli is an expert of hematological malignant and non-malignant disorders of childhood. Prof. Locatelli is the author or co-author of 1,352 peer-reviewed articles published in international journals (including New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Communications, The Lancet, etc.) with 62,900 citations and he has an H-index of 121 (Scopus source). Since February 2019, Prof. Locatelli is serving as President of the National Council of Health (Consiglio Superiore di Sanità). In December 2021, he was nominated 1st Class/Knight Grand Cross (Cavaliere di Gran Croce) by the President of the Italian Republic.

Crystal Mackall, MD
Stanford School of Medicine

Crystal Mackall, MD, is the Ernest and Amelia Gallo Family Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at Stanford University, the Founding Director of the Stanford Center for Cancer Cell Therapy, Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy @ Stanford, and Associate Director of the Stanford Cancer Institute. During a career spanning more than three decades, she has led an internationally recognized translational research program focused on immuneoncology. Her work has advanced understanding of fundamental immunology and translated this understanding for treatment of human disease with a major focus on children’s cancers. Her group was among the first to demonstrate activity of CD19-CAR in pediatric leukemia, developed a CD22-CAR that has received Breakthrough Therapy Designations in pediatric B-ALL and adult LBCL, and is leading development of GD2-CAR T cells for diffuse midline gliomas, incurable brain tumors of childhood. Her group has also defined major resistance mechanisms to engineered cell therapies and created numerous potency enhancements to overcome resistance. She has received numerous awards, including election as a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Association of Physicians, and the American Society of Clinical Investigation, and she is a Fellow of the AACR Academy and the Academy of Immunooncology. She is Board Certified in Pediatrics, Pediatric Hematology-Oncology and Internal Medicine, has co-founded four biotech companies, published over 250 manuscripts and filed more than 35 patents. 

Max Mamonkin, PhD
Baylor College of Medicine

Max Mamonkin, PhD, is an Associate Professor at Baylor College of Medicine. His research focuses on developing and optimizing engineered T-cell therapies for difficult-to-treat cancers and evaluating them in Phase 1 trials. His group at Baylor developed CAR T-cells for T-cell malignancies and AML and engineered strategies to target pathogenic lymphocytes mediating alloreactivity and immune rejection.

John M. Maris, MD
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

John Maris, MD, is the Giulio D’Angio Professor of Pediatrics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He is a physician-scientist who has focused for over three decades on the childhood cancer neuroblastoma with the dual goals of improving patient outcomes and using the disease as a model to understand cancer in general. His group has discovered all the known neuroblastoma susceptibility genes, and his group has also identified many of the oncogenic drivers of the disease. Dr. Maris has steadfastly sought to translate these discoveries to the clinic using precision medicine. He has led efforts to bring the fields of genomics and immunology together to combat childhood cancers, developing novel cellular therapies and vaccines. Dr. Maris is an internationally recognized practicing pediatric oncologist who cares for children with refractory neuroblastoma from around the world, typically in the context of early phase clinical trials. Dr. Maris has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health and many other funding bodies. He currently holds a National Cancer Institute Outstanding Investigator Award and has received several prestigious awards including election into the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the Oski award for outstanding pediatric oncologists, the Berwick award at Penn for melding basic and clinical teaching, and the William Osler Patient Oriented Research Award at Penn. His North American-based immunogenomics team received the AACR 2021 Team Science Award. 

Peter Marks, MD, PhD
Cancer for Biologics Evaluation and Research, FDA

Peter Marks, MD, PhD, received his graduate degree in cell and molecular biology and his medical degree at New York University and completed Internal Medicine residency and Hematology/Medical Oncology training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He has worked in academic settings teaching and caring for patients and in industry on drug development and is an author or co-author of over 100 publications. He joined the FDA in 2012 as Deputy Center Director for the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research and became Center Director in 2016. Over the past several years he has been integrally involved in the response to various public health emergencies, and in 2022 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Marcela Maus, MD, PhD
Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center

Marcela Maus, Md, PhD, is the Director of Cellular Immunotherapy at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and an Attending Physician in the Bone Marrow Transplant and Cell Therapy division of Hematology/Oncology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Maus is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and an Associate Member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard.

Dr. Maus is a translational physician-scientist in the field of immunology, particularly as it relates to cancer. Her research program spans basic mechanisms of human immunology to design and test novel immune-based therapeutic interventions in vitro, in mouse models, and in patients. Her group has initiated novel clinical trials of cell therapies in lymphoma, myeloma, glioblastoma, and has ongoing projects to enhance CAR T cells for multiple solid tumors. 

Julie Park, MD
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Julie Park, MD, is a pediatric hematologist-oncologist whose career has focused on developing and advancing new approaches to childhood cancer therapy. Dr. Park received her MD from the University of Vermont and completed residency training in pediatrics at the University of Washington. Dr. Park then completed a fellowship in pediatric hematology/oncology at the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. As past chair of the Children’s Oncology Group Neuroblastoma committee and current Scientific Chair of the New Approaches to Neuroblastoma therapy, she led research that incorporated our understanding of neuroblastoma biology into improved prognostic stratification and novel targeted therapeutics. In addition, she has translated laboratory discoveries into first in human cellular immunotherapy clinical trials for pediatric cancer that include informative correlative analyses of tumor-specific and immunologic factors providing an improved understanding of cell therapy activity and toxicity and informing future areas of discovery. As a Member of the St. Jude Faculty and Chair of the Oncology Department, Dr. Park continues her interest in discovering the molecular and immunologic vulnerabilities of pediatric cancer, and specifically of neuroblastoma, to inform the development of novel therapeutics. 

Mary Philip, MD, PhD
Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Mary Philip, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Pathology, Microbiology, and Immunology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Dr. Philip received her BS in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University and her MD and PhD in cancer biology from the University of Chicago. She completed Internal Medicine Residency training at the University of Chicago before going to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center/University of Washington for clinical fellowship training in hematology and oncology. Dr. Philip then completed additional postdoctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center before joining the Vanderbilt faculty and starting her research program. Dr. Philip has published seminal work on the epigenetic and transcriptional regulation of tumor-specific T cell dysfunction and received the V Foundation Scholar Award and the National Cancer Institute Early-Stage Investigator Merit Award. Dr. Philip’s research group at Vanderbilt aims to understand how transcription factor-driven chromatin/epigenetic remodeling regulates CD8 T cell differentiation in cancer, infection, and autoimmunity. Dr. Philip’s clinical area of expertise is in caring for patients with hematologic malignancies, particular lymphoma. As a physician-scientist, Dr. Philip’s goal is to use clinically-relevant mouse models of cancer to dissect the molecular mechanisms underlying T cell function/dysfunction and to design novel strategies to transform tumor-specific T cells into potent anti-tumor agents.

Jeffrey Rathmell, PhD
Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Jeffrey Rathmell, PhD, studies T cells inflammatory diseases and cancer with a focus on metabolic mechanisms that regulate lymphocyte fate and function. He received his PhD in Immunology at Stanford University and performed postdoctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania prior to beginning as faculty at Duke University and subsequently Vanderbilt University Medical Center. His lab showed that lymphocyte metabolism is dynamically regulated and that T cell subsets adopt specific metabolic programs that can be targeted to modulate immune cells in inflammatory diseases or in tumor microenvironments and immunotherapy. He joined Vanderbilt in 2015 as the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Immunobiology to found and direct the Vanderbilt Center for Immunobiology and co-leads the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center Program in Host-Tumor Interactions. His awards include Scholar of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Bernard Osher Fellow of the American Asthma Foundation, and William Paul Distinguished Innovator of the Lupus Research Alliance.  

Claudia Rössig, MD
University Children’s Hospital Muenster

Claudia Rössig, MD, received her medical degree at the University of Luebeck in Germany, then joined the Department of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology of University Children´s Hospital Muenster, Germany, as a Clinical Fellow. Between 1998 and 2000, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Malcolm Brenner in the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy, Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, USA. After finishing her clinical training as a pediatrician in 2005 and her specialty registration as a Pediatric Hematologist and Oncologist in 2007, she is now director of the Department of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology in Muenster. Since 2023, she is an affiliated group leader at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology in Utrecht, NL. Her experimental research focuses on the development of cellular immune-therapeutic strategies to treat pediatric malignancies, including both leukemias and solid tumors.

Barbara Savoldo, MD, PhD
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Barbara Savoldo, MD, PhD, is a hematologist with interest in cell-based immunotherapy approaches for hematological and solid tumors. Specifically, she uses T and NKT cells as platforms for exploring genetic immune-manipulations that redirect them to tumors by transgenic expression of alpha-betaTCRs or chimeric tumor-specific receptors (CARs). She has validated preclinically and then clinically CARs for hematological malignancies like Hodgkin Lymphoma, and for solid tumor applications, including neuroblastoma, osteosarcoma and brain tumors. Her research also focuses on gene modifications aimed at improving homing of immune cells to tumors and overcoming the inhibitory effects of the tumor environments. Currently, she is a professor in the Pediatric Department of Hematology-Oncology at UNC, and the co-director of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center (LCCCC) Immunotherapy Program, working on translating preclinical approaches into successful clinical trials through strict collaborations with the UNC-LCCC GMP facility, the UNC-LCCC regulatory office and the UNC-LCCC Oncology Clinical protocol Office.

Nirali Shah, MD
National Cancer Institute

Nirali Shah, MD, is a physician scientist who is a Lasker Clinical Research Scholar and an NIH Distinguished Scholar and serves as the Head of the Hematologic Malignancies Section of the Pediatric Oncology Branch. Her research focuses on the development of targeted immunotherapy approaches to treat high-risk blood cancers, such as leukemia and lymphoma, in children, adolescents, and young adults. She is also interested in the prevention and treatment of relapsed disease after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Her clinical trials focus on exploring and improving chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell based therapies and other antibody-based therapies to target surface proteins found on leukemia cells to improve outcomes for patients with blood cancers that do not respond to chemotherapy. Her research aims to reduce the toxicities and late effects of these therapies.

Poul Sorensen, MD, PhD
University of British Columbia

Poul Sorensen, MD, PhD, OBC, is a board-certified molecular pathologist and Professor of Pathology at the University of British Columbia. He holds the Johal Endowed Chair in Childhood Cancer Research at UBC and is a Distinguished Scientist at the BC Cancer Research Centre. Dr. Sorensen is an internationally renowned expert in mRNA translation and the use of proteomic strategies to characterize cell stress pathways and surface targets that are deregulated in childhood and adult solid cancers, and the potential relevance of these pathways to metastatic capacity. His group has discovered many novel genetic alterations in childhood cancer, including the EWS-ERG fusion in Ewing sarcoma and the ETV6-NTRK3 fusion in infantile sarcomas and secretory breast carcinoma. His discovery of ETV6-NTRK3 is the first description of NTRK fusions as recurrent drivers in human tumors, now thought to occur in >25 different human tumor types and in ~1% of human malignancies, leading to the development of NTRK inhibitors for clinical use. Current work focuses on how tumor cells adapt to stress of the tumor microenvironment, such as hypoxia and oxidative stress, and how such adaptation contributes to enhanced metastatic capacity.

Waseem Qasim, BMedSci, MBBS, PhD, MRCP, MRCPCH
UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health

Waseem Qasim, BMedSci, MBBS, PhD, MRCP, MRCPCH, is a Paediatric Immunologist and Professor of Cell and Gene Therapy at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health.  He has led bench-to-bedside development of translational gene therapies, including clinical trials of T cells engineered to express chimeric antigen receptors, recombinant T cell receptors or suicide genes. Work with lentiviral vectors has been followed by genome editing applications using TALENs, CRISPR/Cas9 and base editing. Promising ‘universal’ CAR T cell options for relapsed B and T cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia are now undergoing evaluation in first-in-human clinical trials.  

Paul Thomas, PhD
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Paul G. Thomas, PhD, is a Member of the Department of Host-Microbe Interactions at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. His work focuses on understanding the principle of T-cell receptor recognition and specificity during development, infections, and tumors. Dr. Thomas obtained his undergraduate degree in Biology and Philosophy at Wake Forest University. His doctoral training at Harvard University worked on the innate immune response to Schistosoma-associated carbohydrates and their role in promoting Th2 responses. After schooling, he relocated to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital for a postdoctoral fellowship with emeritus Dr. Peter Doherty on T-cell responses in the influenza model. In 2009, he developed a lucrative lab, from which he has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers on TCR biology, immunological mechanisms of disease severity in human viral infections, and cellular immunology.

Paulina Velasquez, MD
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Paulina Velasquez, MD, is an Assistant Member in the Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation and Cell Therapy (BMTCT). She received her MD from Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala and then went on to train in Pediatrics and Pediatric Hematology Oncology at Baylor College of Medicine. She joined St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in 2017. As a physician scientist, she is focused on preclinical development of immunotherapeutic strategies for hematological malignancies. She is currently spearheading preclinical cellular immunotherapy efforts to target high-risk leukemias at St. Jude, focusing on antigen discovery and improvement of T-cell function. 

Logan Walsh, PhD
McGill University

Logan Walsh, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Goodman Cancer Institute and Department of Human Genetics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He currently holds the Rosalind Goodman Chair in Lung Cancer Research. Dr. Walsh’s lab uses spatial proteomics combined with artificial intelligence to help develop personalized medicine strategies for cancer patients. His talk will be describing some of his more recent work in understanding the tumor immune microenvironment and how we can leverage spatial information to better understand cancer progression and response to therapy.  

Caitlin Zebley, MD, PhD
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

As a Pediatric Hematology/Oncology fellow at St. Jude, Caitlin Zebley, MD, realized that she wanted to contribute more through research to move the 80% cancer survival rate to 100%. This led to her interest in pursuing her degree from the St. Jude Graduate School with a focus on translational medicine. Zebley earned bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and biology in 2008 from Iona College in New Rochelle, New York. During her undergraduate career, she worked on a NASA research project analyzing ozone in the middle atmosphere of Mars. She went on to complete her medical degree in 2012 from the Chicago Medical School in Illinois where she was involved in global health and worked in a mobile medical clinic in Keyna. After medical school, she completed Pediatric Residency at the University of Minnesota before coming to St. Jude. Zebley currently works in the lab of Benjamin Youngblood, PhD, Immunology. Her research interests are in cancer immunotherapy. She earned her master’s degree from the St. Jude Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in June 2019.