Learning from Cancer to Advance Drug Development for Neurodegeneration

Organizers

Howard Fillit, MD

Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation
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Howard Fillit, a geriatrician, neuroscientist, and expert in Alzheimer's disease, is the founding executive director of the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF). The foundation's mission is to accelerate the discovery and development of drugs to prevent, treat, and cure AD, related dementias, and cognitive aging. Fillit has had a distinguished academic medicine career at The Rockefeller University and Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where he is a clinical professor of geriatrics and medicine and a professor of neurobiology. He is the senior editor of the Textbook of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology. Fillit was previously the corporate medical director for Medicare at New York Life, responsible for over 125 000 Medicare managed-care members in five regional markets. He has received several awards and honors, including the Rita Hayworth Award for Lifetime Achievement. He also serves as a consultant to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, health care organizations, and philanthropies.

Diana Shineman, PhD

Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation
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Diana Shineman is the director for scientific affairs at the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation, where she develops and manages drug discovery and development grant programs and strategic initiatives. Shineman led an interdisciplinary effort to standardize animal model study design to improve research efficiency and translatability. She earned her PhD in cell and molecular biology in 2008 from the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked in the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research led by Drs. Virginia Lee and John Trojanowski. She also worked as an editorial intern for the Journal of Clinical Investigation and was an active member of the Penn Biotechnology Group. Shineman was a Howard Hughes Undergraduate Research Scholar.

Sonya Dougal, PhD

The New York Academy of Sciences

Sonya Dougal is the director of Life Sciences Discussion Groups at the New York Academy of Sciences. She develops an annual portfolio of scientific symposia on life sciences and biomedical research. Dougal has over 14 years of experience in scientific research and program management in academia, industry, and nonprofits. She holds a PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. She was the recipient of a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health for her postdoctoral training as a cognitive neuroscientist in the laboratory of Elizabeth Phelps at New York University.

Keynote Speaker

Jane A. Driver, MD, MPH

Brigham and Women's Hospital
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Jane A. Driver is a member of the Geriatrics Research Education and Clinical Center (GRECC) at VA Boston Healthcare System Division of Aging at Brigham and Women's Hospital and of the Division of Medical Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She is also an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. Trained as both a geriatrician and an oncologist, her research focuses on the epidemiology, prediction, and prevention of cancer and neurodegenerative disease. She is investigating the link between cancer and Alzheimer's disease, as well as new methods of early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. She has received research grants from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Hartford Foundation, the Parkinson's Disease Foundation, and Harvard Medical School. Driver works with vulnerable elderly veterans with memory disorders and teaches in geriatrics and oncology. She is codirector of the Older Adult Hematologic Malignancy Program at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Speakers

Kurt R. Brunden, PhD

University of Pennsylvania
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Kurt R. Brunden is director of drug discovery and a research professor in the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research (CNDR) at the University of Pennsylvania, where he oversees drug discovery programs in the areas of Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal lobar degeneration, and Parkinson's disease. Before joining CNDR Brunden was an executive in the biotechnology sector, managing drug discovery programs in AD, cognitive enhancement, schizophrenia, inflammation, metabolic disease, and cancer. Before working in industry, Brunden was an NIH-funded faculty member in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, with a research focus on the regulation of myelination. He obtained his PhD in biochemistry from Purdue University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mayo Clinic.

Stuart K. Calderwood, PhD

Harvard Medical School
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Stuart K. Calderwood obtained his PhD from Newcastle University, UK, and carried out postdoctoral fellowships studying the mammalian stress response at Newcastle University and Stanford University. He joined the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School, where he and studied the transcription of molecular chaperone genes. He later became director of the Molecular Stress Response Center and a professor of medicine at Boston University and then director of Molecular and Cellular Biology and a professor of radiation oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. Calderwood studies the regulation of molecular chaperone gene expression in cancer and aging as well as the immune properties of heat shock proteins. His research has been continuously funded through the National Cancer Institute since 1986 and he has been a member of multiple National Institutes of Health study sections.

Gary Landreth, PhD

Case Western Reserve University
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Gary Landreth completed his PhD in neuroscience at the University of Michigan, with a year of study at the National Institute of Medical Research in London, UK. He did postdoctoral work in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University. Landreth was appointed to the faculty of the Medical University of South Carolina, where he worked for 9 years, and moved to Case Western Reserve University and the Alzheimer Research Laboratory in 1989. He is currently a professor in the Department of Neurosciences, focusing on the investigation of Alzheimer's disease and the development of new drugs for its treatment.

Tamara Maes, PhD

Oryzon Genomics
publications

Tamara Maes received her PhD in biotechnology from the University of Ghent, Belgium, where she worked on developmental genetics. She was a European Union postdoctoral fellow at the Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) in Barcelona, Spain, and founded Oryzon in 2000, becoming its chief scientific officer. The company identified biomarkers for minimally invasive detection of endometrial cancer in postmenopausal women, developing its first marketed product, GynEC-Dx, in the diagnostics area. The company also identified early human biomarkers in several neurodegenerative disorders, and in 2008 proposed to start a drug discovery program for LSD1. This program split into two branches, with molecules optimized for CNS uses and oncological indications. The oncology drug, ORY-1001, received orphan drug status from the European Medicine Agency and is currently in clinical phase I/IIA trials for acute leukemia. It has recently been licensed to Roche. The CNS drug, ORY-2001, is a dual LSD1-MAOB inhibitor expected to enter the clinic for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease by the end of 2015.

David M. Roy, PhD

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
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David Roy is in his final year at the Weill Cornell/Rockefeller/Sloan-Kettering Tri-Institutional MD-PhD Program in New York. While in medical school, he completed a two-year Howard Hughes Medical Institute research fellowship, studying the role of PTPRD in cancer. He received his PhD from Weill Cornell Medical College in 2015 under the supervision of Dr. Timothy Chan at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. His graduate work focused on studying genomic alterations in glioma and developing computational strategies to identify driver genes involved in malignant transformation and metastasis. He is currently exploring the role of arm-level copy number alterations in cancer progression.

Stephen M. Strittmatter, MD, PhD

Yale University School of Medicine
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Stephen M. Strittmatter completed MD and PhD training at Johns Hopkins University, studying with Dr. Solomon H. Snyder. He moved to Massachusetts General Hospital for a medical internship and an adult neurology residency. While there he worked as a research fellow with Dr. Mark Fishman, exploring the molecular basis of axonal guidance. He joined the faculty of Yale University in 1993, where he currently holds the Vincent Coates Professorship of Neurology and is a founding director of the Yale Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair Interdepartmental Program. He is also director of the Yale Memory Disorders Clinic. His work has contributed to defining a molecular basis for axonal guidance during development and neural repair after adult injury. More recently, his laboratory has also explored ligand-receptor interactions in degenerative dementias. Work on amyloid-β oligomer toxicity has defined a pathway from PrPC to mGluR5 to Fyn.

Li-Huei Tsai, PhD

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Li-Huei Tsai is the director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is interested in the mechanisms of neurological disorders accompanied by learning and memory impairments—both neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and neurodevelopmental disorders. She has studied neuronal development and function in the developing and adult brain, as well as how neuronal function and circuitry may be dysregulated in disorders of cognitive impairment. Her lab identified histone deacetylase 2 (HDAC2) as a key negative regulator of genes implicated in activity regulation, synaptogenesis, and synaptic plasticity. She received her PhD from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and completed postdoctoral training at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Massachusetts General Hospital. Tsai joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School and was named an investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute before joining the Picower Institute.

R. Scott Turner, MD, PhD

Georgetown University
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R. Scott Turner is a professor of neurology and the director of the Memory Disorders Program at Georgetown University Medical Center. He was previously chief of the Neurology Service at the Veterans Affairs Ann Arbor Healthcare System and an associate professor and associate chair in the Department of Neurology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He holds MD and PhD degrees from Emory University and completed internship, residency, and fellowship training at the University of Pennsylvania. He is board certified in psychiatry and neurology. Turner lectures widely and serves as a reviewer for granting agencies and biomedical journals. He directs clinical studies sponsored by industry and the National Institutes of Health. Most recently, he was the principal investigator of a multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase II trial of resveratrol for mild–moderate Alzheimer's disease, in collaboration with the National Institute on Aging–funded Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study (ADCS).

Claes Wahlestedt, MD, PhD

University of Miami Miller School of Medicine
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Claes Wahlestedt is the Leonard M. Miller Professor and associate dean and center director for therapeutic innovation at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. His research focuses on epigenetics, mammalian transcriptomics, noncoding RNAs, cancer, neuroscience, and drug discovery in several therapeutic areas. Wahlestedt obtained his MD and PhD degrees from Lund University, Sweden, and has worked in academia and in the pharmaceutical industry. Before joining the University of Miami, he was a professor and director of neuroscience at the Florida campus of the Scripps Research Institute, and previously an endowed professor of pharmacogenomics and chair of the Department for Genomics and Bioinformatics at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden. He has directed large drug discovery and biotechnology teams in the pharmaceutical industry for Astra-Zeneca, Pharmacia & Upjohn, and Pharmacia Corporation. His most recent biotechnology start-ups are CURNA Inc. (focusing on noncoding RNAs; acquired by OPKO Health in 2011) and Epigenetix Inc. (focusing on chromatin regulators).

Hui Zheng, PhD

Baylor College of Medicine
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Hui Zheng holds a PhD from Baylor College of Medicine. She studies the biological and pathophysiological functions of the amyloid precursor protein (APP) and presenilins. Her work revealed APP as a synaptic adhesion protein and identified an intriguing role of presenilins in skin tumorigenesis. Recently, Zheng expanded her focus to investigate the neuron-glia signaling pathways and intracellular clearance mechanisms in neuronal health and Alzheimer's disease. Zheng holds the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair and directs the Huffington Center on Aging at Baylor College of Medicine. She has also researched Alzheimer's disease at Merck Research Laboratories. She serves on the Cellular & Molecular Biology of Neurodegeneration (CMND) Study Section and is a member of the BrightFocus Foundation Scientific Advisory Committee and the Alzheimer's Association Medical & Scientific Advisory Council.

Jennifer Cable

Jennifer Cable lives in New York City, where she experiments with different outlets to communicate science. She enjoys bringing science to scientists and nonscientists alike. She writes for Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, Bitesize Bio, Under the Microscope, and the Nature New York blog. She received a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her research in investigating the structure/function relationship of proteins.