From Tumor Suppressors to Oncogenic Dynamics: The 2015 Dr. Paul Janssen Award Symposium

Speakers

Christopher Counter, PhD

Duke University School of Medicine

Dr. Counter undertook his PhD with Drs. Harley and Bacchetti at McMaster University and his postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute, where he studied the role of telomeres and telomerase on cell immortalization and cancer. He began an Assistant Professorship in the Department of Pharmacology & Cancer Biology at Duke University, where he exploited the ability of telomerase to immortalize human cells as an experimental platform to explore oncogenic RAS signaling, which is now a major focus of the lab. Dr. Counter is currently a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology & Cancer Biology at Duke University and has active leadership roles in the Duke Cancer Institute.

Brooke Grindlinger, PhD

The New York Academy of Sciences

Daniel A. Haber, MD, PhD

Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Daniel Haber is Director of the MGH Cancer Center and the Isselbacher/Schwartz Professor of Oncology at Harvard Medical School. His laboratory interests have focused on the area of cancer genetics, including the etiology of the pediatric kidney cancer Wilms tumor and genetic predisposition to breast cancer. Recently, his laboratory reported that lung cancers with activating mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) are uniquely sensitive to tyrosine kinase inhibitors that target this receptor. This observation has had important implications for the genotype-directed treatment of non-small cell lung cancer, and more broadly for strategies to identify critical genetic lesions in cancers that may serve as an "Achilles heel" and be suitable for molecular targeting. In collaboration with Dr. Mehmet Toner’s laboratory, Dr. Haber’s laboratory has recently established the application of a novel microfluidic technology for quantifying and purifying circulating tumor cells from the blood of patients with various epithelial cancers. This new application has potentially profound implications for early diagnosis of cancer and for noninvasive molecular profiling of cancers during the course of therapy.  

William N. Hait, MD, PhD

Janssen Research & Development

Carl June, MD

University of Pennsylvania

Carl June is the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. He is currently Director of Translational Research at the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of PA, and is an Investigator of the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute. He is a graduate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, 1979. He had graduate training in Immunology and malaria with Dr. Paul-Henri Lambert at the World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland from 1978-79, and post-doctoral training in transplantation biology with Dr. E. Donnell Thomas and Dr. John Hansen at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle from 1983-1986. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology. He founded the Immune Cell Biology Program and was head of the Department of Immunology at the Naval Medical Research Institute from 1990 to 1995 before joining the faculty of the Perelman School of Medicine in 1999. He maintains a research laboratory that studies various mechanisms of lymphocyte activation that relate to immune tolerance and adoptive immunotherapy for cancer and chronic infection. In 2014, Dr. June is considered the most influential academic scientist in the biopharmaceutical industry according to FierceBiotech.

Peter Lebowitz, MD, PhD

Janssen Research & Development

Bert Vogelstein, MD

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
website

Dr. Vogelstein obtained a B.A. degree in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.D. degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He performed his internship and residency in pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institute. He is currently the Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology and Co-Director of the Ludwig Institute at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. He is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Scholar of the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research. His work focuses on the molecular genetic basis of human tumorigenesis and its implications for the diagnosis and treatment of patients with cancer.

Additional speakers to be announced.