MicroRNAs: A Gene Silencing Mechanism with Therapeutic Implications

Organizers

Lynn M. Abell, PhD

Bristol-Myers Squibb

Andreas G. Bader, PhD, MSc

Mirna Therapeutics, Inc.

David Brown, PhD

Mirna Therapeutics, Inc.

David Brown serves as VP of Preclinical Pharmacology at Mirna Therapeutics and has worked with the company since its inception in 2008. Previously, Dr. Brown was the Director of Discovery at Asuragen, Inc., where he oversaw efforts to identify diagnostic and therapeutic applications for microRNAs. Prior to joining Asuragen, Dr. Brown worked for ten years as a senior scientist and Director of R&D at Ambion, Inc. Dr. Brown received his PhD in molecular biology from the University of Colorado.

Sonya Dougal, PhD

The New York Academy of Sciences

Paul Lammers, MD MSc

Mirna Therapeutics, Inc.

Paul Lammers, MD, MSc, joined Mirna Therapeutics in November 2009 as its President, CEO, and Director of the Board. Since joining the company, Paul has led the team in successfully raising more than 150 million dollars for the company, both from leading traditional and corporate venture firms, Federal and State grant programs, including the Texas Emerging Technology Fund (ETF) and the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), and by recently bringing the company public (NASDAQ: MIRN). Prior to joining Mirna Therapeutics, Dr. Lammers served as President of Repros Therapeutics in The Woodlands, Texas, after having served for 6 years as the Chief Medical Officer for EMD Serono Inc., a Division of German pharmaceutical company, Merck KgA. He began his career with Dutch pharmaceutical company, Organon, spending 8 years in the commercial and clinical operations in Europe and the US. He also served 4 years as Senior Vice President of clinical and regulatory affairs at Zonagen in The Woodlands, TX. Dr. Lammers obtained his Medical and Masters of Science degrees from Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and moved with his family to the US in 1992.

Caitlin McOmish, PhD

The New York Academy of Sciences

George Zavoico, PhD

JonesTrading Institutional Services

George B. Zavoico, PhD, is a Senior Equity Analyst, Healthcare, at JonesTrading Institutional Services, a leading equity trading firm with a focus on block trading and a growing capital markets business. He has over 11 years of experience as a life sciences analyst writing research on publicly traded equities. His principal focus is on biotechnology, biopharmaceutical, specialty pharmaceutical, and molecular diagnostics companies. He received The Financial Times/Starmine Award two years in a row for being among the top-ranked earnings estimators in the biotechnology sector. In 2009, Zavoico was hired as the first equity analyst at MLV & Co., a New York-based boutique investment bank and institutional broker-dealer at the time, where he helped establish its Healthcare research team. He returned to MLV in mid-2014 after serving for a brief period as a Senior Equity Analyst at H.C. Wainwright & Co. in early 2014, and then joined JonesTrading in early 2015. Previously, Zavoico was an equity research analyst in the healthcare sector at Westport Capital Markets and Cantor Fitzgerald. Prior to working as an analyst, Zavoico established his own consulting company serving the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, providing competitive intelligence and marketing research, due diligence services and guidance in regulatory affairs. Zavoico began his career as a senior research scientist at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., moving on to management positions at Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc. and T Cell Sciences Inc. (now Celldex Therapeutics Inc.). Zavoico has a bachelor's degree in biology from St. Lawrence University and a Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Virginia. He held post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School/Brigham & Women's Hospital. He has published more than 30 papers in peer-reviewed journals and has coauthored four book chapters.

Keynote Speaker

David Bartel, PhD

Whitehead/MIT/HHMI

David Bartel received his PhD from Harvard in 1993 and has since headed a lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, where he is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Professor of Biology at MIT. His lab initially studied the ability of RNA to catalyze reactions and more recently has focused on RNAs that regulate gene expression. Over the past 16 years his lab has helped define microRNAs and other types of small regulatory RNAs and has contributed to the understanding of their genomics, biogenesis and regulatory targets, as well as the molecular and biological consequences of their actions in animals, plants and fungi.

Speakers

Maria Angelica Cortez, PhD

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

Maria Angelica received her master's and Ph.D degree from University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2009. She completed part of her thesis at Dr. George Calin laboratory at MD Anderson, where she devoted her thesis to understanding the roles of noncoding RNAs, including microRNAs, in the molecular mechanisms underlying tumor progression. She joined Dr. Welsh's lab as a postdoctoral fellow in 2011 and was appointed Instructor at the Department of Radiation Oncology in 2015. Dr. Cortez's long-term career goal is to discover novel therapeutic strategies involving microRNAs to target immunotherapy resistant lung and breast cancer cells. Her current projects include: 1) understanding the mechanisms by which tumors evade the immune system, and 2) exploring the interaction between radiation and microRNA therapeutics for the treatment of lung cancer.

Paul Grint, MD

Regulus Therapeutics

Dr. Grint joined Regulus in June 2014 as Chief Medical Officer and was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer in June 2015. Dr. Grint has over two decades of experience in biologics and small molecule development, including the successful commercialization of numerous commercial products in oncology, anti-infectives and immunology in both domestic and international markets. Prior to joining Regulus, Dr. Grint was President of Cerexa, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Forest Laboratories, Inc., where he was responsible for the oversight of anti-infective product development. Prior to that, Dr. Grint served as Senior Vice President of Research at Forest Research Institute, Inc., Chief Medical Officer at Kalypsys, Inc., and Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at Zephyr Sciences, Inc., and he also served in similar executive level positions at Pfizer Inc., IDEC Pharmaceuticals Corporation, and Schering-Plough Corporation. Dr. Grint received his bachelor's degree from St. Mary's Hospital in London and his medical degree from St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College at the University of London. Dr. Grint is a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, a member of numerous professional and medical societies, and the author or co-author of over fifty scientific publications.

David S. Hong, MD

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

Daniel J. Siegwart, PhD

University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Daniel J. Siegwart is an Assistant Professor in the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and Department of Biochemistry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW). He received a BS in Biochemistry from Lehigh University in 2003, and a PhD in Chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 2008 under the supervision of University Professor Krzysztof Matyjaszewski. During his graduate studies, he received the Joseph A. Solomon Memorial Fellowship in Chemistry at CMU and was a National Science Foundation East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes Fellow at the University of Tokyo in 2006 with Prof. Kazunori Kataoka. Dan then completed a National Institute of Health sponsored Postdoctoral Fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Institute Professor Robert Langer (2008–2012). Dan began his independent research career in 2012 at UTSW. The Siegwart Research Group's long-term goals are to develop new materials for therapeutic nucleic acid delivery (siRNA, miRNA, mRNA, CRISPR sgRNA), develop new polymers to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs to hypovascular tumors, develop theranostic "turn on" probes, and to globally understand how the physical and chemical properties of materials affect interactions with biological systems in vitro and in vivo in the context of improving cancer therapies. They aspire to utilize chemistry and engineering to make a beneficial impact on human health through improved cancer therapies.

Frank Slack, PhD

BIDMC Cancer Center/Harvard Medical School

Frank Slack, PhD, is Director of the Institute for RNA Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). He is a Professor of Pathology.

Frank Slack received his BSc from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, before completing his PhD in molecular biology at Tufts University School of Medicine. He started work on microRNAs as a postdoctoral fellow in Gary Ruvkun's laboratory at Harvard Medical School, where he co-discovered the second known microRNA, let-7 and the first human microRNA. He subsequent moved to the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University, where he was a program leader in the Yale Cancer Center, and the Director of the Yale Center for RNA Science and Medicine. There he discovered that microRNAs regulate key human oncogenes and have the potential to act as therapeutics. He also demonstrated the first role for a microRNA in the aging process. In 2014 he became Director of the Institute for RNA Medicine and a Professor of Pathology at BIDMC.

Dr. Slack studies the roles and uses of microRNAs and their targets in development, disease and aging. He has been at the forefront of the small RNA revolution. He was in the team that discovered the first human microRNA, let-7 and subsequently showed that it is a tumor suppressor that controls key cancer genes, such as RAS, MYC and LIN28. They are developing let-7 and a second microRNA, miR-34 as novel cancer therapeutics with miR-34 already in Phase I clinical trials. They also proved that microRNAs act as key oncogenes and developed strategies to target these oncomiRs for cancer therapy. Their research also extends to discovery of additional novel small RNAs in development, cancer, aging and diabetes as well as identifying novel SNPs in the non-coding portions of the genome with an eye to identifying the next generation of actionable targets in cancer.

Dr. Slack was an Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar and received the 2014 Heath Memorial Award from MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Joana Vidigal, PhD

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Dr. Vidigal received her PhD from the Free University of Berlin in 2011, where she developed an inducible RNAi platform to study mouse embryogenesis. Since then, as a research fellow in the lab of Andrea Ventura at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, she has been focused on understanding the role of noncoding elements—and in particular miRNAs—in controlling gene expression, and how their deregulation can contribute to disease. Using an allelic series of genetically engineered mouse models, Dr. Vidigal helped define the functional contributions of individual components of the oncogenic miR-17~92 cluster to the regulation of mammalian development and tumor progression. She is currently establishing CRISPR-Cas9 tools to functionally query the noncoding genome in a high-throughput manner.

Dr. Vidigal is a recipient of the 2016 Memorial Sloan Kettering Postdoctoral Research Award.