Faculty
Ranjana Advani
Stanford, USA
Stanford Health Care
Ranjana Advani
Dr. Ranjana Advani is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University specializing in the field of lymphoma. She holds an endowed chair (Saul Rosenberg Professor) and oversees all aspects of treatment of the vast majority of adult lymphoma patients. She also serves as the disease management group leader for lymphoma and supervises the clinical program. Her primary research interests include improving care for non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) patients by optimizing front line regimens, developing novel agents and targeted therapy for refractory and recurrent disease, advancing correlative studies involving biomarkers, and addressing long-term outcomes. She leads multi-institutional efforts as a national study Principle Investigator (PI) or Co-PI on several targeted therapies, translational and imaging studies and has published extensively in the peer reviewed literature. She is a member of the lymphoma core committee for the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group and the NCCN guidelines committee for Non Hodgkin Lymphoma and Hodgkin Lymphoma (vice chair), member of ODAC (Oncology Drug Advisory Committee) to the FDA, and has completed a term serving as the co-chair of the National Cancer Institute Lymphoma Steering Committee.
Elias Campo
Barcelona, Spain
Hospital Clinic, University of Barcelona
Elias Campo
Elias Campo. MD, PhD, is Professor of Pathology and Senior Consultant of Hematopathology at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, University of Barcelona. He is also Director of the Institute for Biomedical Research August Pi i Sunyer (IDIBAPS) of Barcelona.
His research focuses on the characterization of the pathology of lymphoid neoplasms and the understanding of the molecular and genetic mechanisms underlying the pathogenesis of these tumors. The main goal is to translate into the clinical practice the knowledge that may improve the diagnosis, prognosis and therapeutic intervention in these patients. In the last years his work has concentrated in elucidating the genomic/epigenomic alterations in chronic lymphocytic leukemia, mantle cell lymphoma and other aggressive lymphomas and their impact in understanding the biology of these diseases and clinical management of the patients. He has been co-Director of the Spanish ICGC-CLL genome project and was elected as member of the USA National Academy of Medicine in 2018.
Andrew Davies
Southampton, USA
University of Southampthon
Andrew Davies
Andrew Davies is Professor of Haematological Oncology in the Cancer Sciences Unit in the Faculty of Medicine, University Hospital Southampton. He completed his training in Medical Oncology at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, and as a Cancer Research UK clinical fellow he undertook a PhD examining the molecular mechanisms underlying transformation of follicular lymphoma to more aggressive histological sub-types.
Prof. Davies specialises in the treatment of malignant lymphoma and the use of high-dose chemotherapy. He has a particular interest in the investigation of monoclonal antibody-containing therapies applied to lymphoma and also in the translation of biomarkers and novel therapies to the clinical arena. He has extensive experience in early phase trials, including leading several first in man lymphoma studies.
He is the past Chair of the UK National Cancer Research Institute High Grade Lymphoma Study Group and Director of Cancer Research UK/National Institute of Health Southampton Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre. He is also the Wessex regional lead for cancers in Teenagers and Young Adults.
Michael Hallek
Cologne, Germany
University of Cologne
Michael Hallek
Prof. Hallek received his MD degree from the University of Munich, Germany, in 1985. He trained in pharmacology and internal medicine from 1985 to 1990 at the University and Technical University of Munich. From 1990 to 1992, he spent two years as a research associate at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA, before returning to the University of Munich, where he continued his training in internal medicine and in hematology and oncology. From 1994 to 2005, he was head of the Gene Therapy Program at the Gene Center of the University of Munich and at the National Centre for Research on Environment and Health (GSF), Munich. In 1996, he founded the German CLL Study Group and is its chairman until today. Since 2003, Dr. Hallek is Professor of Medicine, Director and Chair of the Department I of Internal Medicine at the University of Cologne. Since 2007, he is also the chairman of the Center for Integrated Oncology (CIO), the joint comprehensive cancer center of the Universities of Cologne and Bonn, since 2019 he is chairman of the CIO Aachen, Bonn, Cologne and Düsseldorf. Since 2011, he is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina). He received numerous awards such as the Paul-Martini Award in 2012, the Binet-Rai-Medal in 2013, the Walter-Siegenthaler Medal in gold in 2016, the German Cancer Award 2017, the Arthur Burkhardt Award 2017, the Johann-Georg-Zimmermann Award 2018, and the José Carreras Award 2019 of the European Hematology Association. He has received the honour of the Ham-Wasserman Lecture of the American Society of Hematology in 2018. President of the German Society of Internal Medicine DGIM (2014-2015) Chairman of the German Society of Hematology and Medical Oncology DGHO (2016-2019). Since 2018, he is chairman of the scientific committee of the European School of Haematology, Paris. He is president of the Walter Siegenthaler Society and member of the Strategy Advisory Board “National Decade against Cancer” of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research since 2019. Since 2020, he is associate editor of the journal Blood.
Ralf Küppers
Essen, Germany
Universität Duisburg-Essen
Ralf Küppers
Ralf Küppers studied biology at the University of Cologne (Germany). He performed his Ph.D. studies in human immunology also in Cologne, in the group of Prof. Klaus Rajewsky. After finishing his Ph.D. in 1995, he set up his own research group. In 1999 he habilitated and became lecturer (Privatdozent). In 2000/2001, he stayed for a 6-months sabbatical at the Columbia University in New York with Prof. Riccardo Dalla-Favera. After this, he returned to Cologne. Since 2004 he is full professor of Molecular Genetics at the Institute of Cell Biology (Cancer Research), Medical Faculty, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany.
The research of Ralf Küppers is focussed on the pathogenesis of human B-cell lymphomas, in particular Hodgkin lymphoma and CLL. He also studies the differentiation and function of normal mature B cells in humans, especially germinal center B cells and memory B cells. A furthr interest is the role of viruses in B cell lymphomagenesis.
Prof. Küppers published over 280 articles, book chapters and commentaries. He was awarded with several prices, including the Georg Köhler award of the German Society of Immunology, The German Cancer Prize of the Germany Society of Cancer Aid, and the Wilhelm Warner Cancer Prize. He is Associate Editor of Leukemia.
David Kurtz
Stanford, USA
Stanford University Medical Center
David Kurtz
David Kurtz, MD, PhD, completed his MD at the Mayo Clinic in 2009. He then moved to Stanford University, where he completed his internal medicine residency and hematology & oncology fellowship. As part of his fellowship work, Dr. Kurtz obtained a PhD in Bioengineering, focused on developing genomic techniques and their application to cancer. Much of Dr. Kurtz’s focus has been on developing liquid biopsy methods and their application in lymphomas. He has been a driving force behind the application of circulating tumor DNA to B-cell lymphomas and lymphoid malignancies. This includes development and application of such techniques as immunoglobulin high-throughput sequencing and targeted approaches such as Cancer Personalized Profiling by Deep Sequencing (CAPP-Seq). This research has directly led to the translation of ctDNA into the clinic in multiple ongoing novel clinical trial paradigms. In addition to development of novel molecular biology tools, Dr. Kurtz also has interest in developing tools to utilize liquid biopsies for clinically relevant applications.
Currently, Dr. Kurtz is an instructor at Stanford University Medical Center. His research interests are focused on developing novel methods for detecting, monitoring, and treating cancers. His ongoing research focuses on applications including discovery of genomic mechanisms of resistance to targeted therapies in lymphomas, and early detection of diverse cancers including solid and liquid tumors.
José Ignacio Martín-Subero
Barcelona, Spain
Hospital Clinic, University of Barcelona
Martín-Subero
Dr. Martin-Subero graduated from the University of Navarra (Spain) with a degree in Biochemistry. In 2001, he completed a PhD with honours as a joined effort between the University of Navarra and the Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel (Germany). He continued his postdoctoral training at the Christian-Albrechts University and in 2005 he became faculty member. Upon returning to Spain in 2009, he started to coordinate a research group on epigenomics at the University of Barcelona. In 2016, he was appointed leader of the Biomedical Epigenomics group at the IDIBAPS research institute in Barcelona, and in 2018 we was awarded with an ICREA Research Professorship. He has published over 180 peer-reviewed articles.
Dr. Martin-Subero’s research is focused on the application of advanced sequencing and computational technologies to characterize epigenomic marks in normal and neoplastic lymphoid cells. His group has reported the first epigenomes during normal B cell differentiation as well as in a variety of B-cell neoplasms, including chronic lymphocytic leukemia, mantle cell lymphoma and multiple myeloma. His studies have revealed that the roles of DNA methylation in cancer can be multiple and are dependent on the genomic context, and that DNA methylation represents a powerful biomarker to estimate clinical behaviour. His current efforts are focused on understanding gene deregulation in lymphoid tumours through the integration of DNA methylation, histone modifications, chromatin accessibility and 3D chromatin structure, including studies at the single cell level. His ultimate goal is that the generated epigenomic knowledge can be translated into a benefit for patients, in terms of better diagnosis, estimation of prognosis and more appropriate treatments.
Teresa Palomero
New York, USA
Institute for Cancer Genetics – Columbia University
Teresa Palomero
Dr. Palomero is a researcher in the field of leukemia and lymphoma genomics at Columbia University. She obtained her PhD on Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Oviedo (Spain). She then moved to Boston where she did her postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Look, working on the regulation of transcription factor oncogenes in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL).
Dr. Palomero joined Columbia University in 2005, where she initially worked on T-ALL implementing the integrative use of gene expression profiling, ChIP-on-chip and ChIP-seq analysis for the dissection of the oncogenic programs responsible for the transformation of T-cell progenitors (PNAS 2006; Nat Med 2007; PNAS 2009; Nat Med 2009; Nat Med 2012). She pioneered the use of next generation sequencing approaches to identify novel mutations associated with T cell malignancies -including those in the PHF6 gene (Nat Genet 2010); the NT5C2 mutations associated with chemotherapy resistance (Nat Med 2013) and the RHOA G17V and FYN mutations in Peripheral T-cell Lymphomas (Palomero et al. Nat Genet 2014)- and to analyze clonal evolution in ALL (Oshima et al., PNAS 2016).
Since 2014, she has developed an independent program in the field of mature T-cell malignancies, including Peripheral T-cell lymphoma (PTCL). Her research focuses on the molecular analyses of the genomic landscape of PTCL and on generation of preclinical models for dissecting the interaction between tumor and microenvironment and developing experimental therapeutics for this disease. Her group has already established groundbreaking models in the field of PTCL, reflected by high impact publications in Nature Genetics (da Silva Almeida et al., 2015), PNAS (Abate et al., 2017), Cancer Cell (Cortes et al., 2018) and Nature Cancer (Moon et al., 2021).
Klaus Rajewsky
Cologne, Germany
MDC Berlin-Buch
Klaus Rajewsky
Klaus Rajewsky and collaborators developed a general method of targeted mutagenesis in mouse embryonic stem cells by introducing bacteriophage- and yeast-derived recombination systems, which opened the way for conditional gene targeting. Using this and other methods in their immunological work, they developed, together with N. A. Mitchison and N. K. Jerne, the antigen-bridge model of T-B cell cooperation, identified germinal centers as the sites of antibody somatic hypermutation, the B cell antigen receptor as a survival determinant of B cells, and the germinal center as a major site of human B cell lymphomagenesis, including Hodgkin lymphoma. Over the last years the work of his group has focused on mechanisms of microRNA control, targeted mutagenesis and gene repair in hematopoietic cells including mouse and human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells, differentiation and subset determination in B lymphocytes, and the development of mouse models of human B cell lymphomas.
Klaus Rajewsky obtained his medical degree at the University of Frankfurt. After postdoctoral work at the Institut Pasteur in Paris he built an immunology department at the Institute for Genetics, University of Cologne, where he stayed for 38 years, was the founding Program Coordinator of the EMBL Mouse Biology Program at Monterotondo near Rome, worked for 10 years at Harvard Medical School in Boston, and is since 2012 Senior Group Leader at the Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Germany. He won numerous scientific awards and is a member of several learned societies including the National Academy of Sciences of the USA and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Stephen Schuster
Philadelphia, USA
University of Pennsylvania
Stephen Schuster
Stephen J. Schuster, MD is the Robert and Margarita Louis-Dreyfus Professor of CLL and Lymphoma and a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the Director of the Lymphoma Program and Director of Lymphoma Translational Research at the Abramson Cancer Center.
After graduating AOA from Jefferson Medical College and completing his residency at Pennsylvania Hospital, Dr. Schuster completed clinical and research fellowships at the Cardeza Foundation for Hematologic Research. In 1989, he became a member of the Cardeza Foundation at Jefferson Medical College.
Dr. Schuster joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. Since then, his research has focused on the development and application of novel immunotherapies for B-cell lymphomas and CLL, including autologous tumor-derived vaccines, autologous co-stimulated T-cells, radioimmunotherapy, monoclonal antibody therapy, bi-specific antibody therapy, and adoptive immunotherapy using chimeric antigen receptor modified T cells (CAR-T cells)
He has over 300 publications and has received numerous awards for outstanding teaching and research.
Laurie Sehn
Vancouver, Canada
British Columbia Cancer Agency Centre
Laurie Sehn
Dr Laurie Sehn is currently Clinical Professor with the BC Cancer Centre for Lymphoid Cancer and University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She has been a medical oncologist and clinical investigator at BC Cancer since 1998, and is currently the Chair of the Lymphoma Tumour Group. Dr Sehn graduated from McGill Medical School, Montreal, Canada and received her training in Internal Medicine at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, Columbia University, New York, USA. She was trained in Haematology-Oncology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University, Boston, and received a Masters of Public Health degree from Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University. Prior to returning to Canada, she spent a year as faculty at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute with the Bone Marrow Transplantation service. Dr. Sehn’s research interests include population-based outcomes analyses, identification of prognostic factors and predictive biomarkers, and development of novel therapies in lymphoma. Dr Sehn is Chair of the medical advisory board for the International Lymphoma Coalition. She has also served as a member of the editorial board of Journal of Clinical Oncology and Leukemia Lymphoma, and is currently an Associate Editor for Blood. Dr. Sehn also serves as co-chair of the Lymphoma Site of the Canadian Cancer Trials Group and co-chair of the Lunenburg Lymphoma Biomarker Consortium.
John Seymour
Melbourne, Australia
Peter MacCallum Centre
John Seymour
Professor John Seymour AM is a clinical haematologist and Director of the Department of Haematology of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre & the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. He received his MB, BS degrees from the University of Melbourne in 1987, and completed a translational research fellowship at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, receiving their Distinguished Alumnus award in 2011. He has a PhD for research on the pathobiology of haematopoietic growth factors conducted at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. Professor Seymour is the co-chair of the federal ministerial Blood Cancer Taskforce and a member of several national and international scientific committees including, the Scientific Board of the International Workshop on CLL, American Society of Hematology Scientific Committee on Lymphoid Neoplasia, Scientific Advisory Committee for the International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma, Medical Advisory Board of the Lymphoma Coalition, and the Board of Directors of the International Extranodal Lymphoma Study Group. He served for more than a decade as Executive member and Chairman of the major national clinical trials co-operative group in haematologic malignancies, the Australasian Leukaemia & Lymphoma Group, and 6 years as Associate Director of Research (Clinical) for Peter Mac. He is a frequent invited speaker nationally and internationally, member of numerous professional societies, an Editor-in-Chief of Leukemia & Lymphoma, and currently on the editorial boards of ten academic journals including Blood, Journal of Clinical Oncology, and the British Journal of Haematology. He has authored 19 book chapters, >500 peer reviewed publications (with >35,000 literature citations; h-index = 82), and >750 conference abstracts. Actively involved in a broad range of clinical and translational research, Professor Seymour has been the principal investigator on >85 clinical trials and chief investigator on competitive grants awarded >AUD$95 million funding in the last 10 years. In 2015 he was awarded Membership of the Order of Australia, and elected to the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences for his contributions to the field.
Louis Staudt
Bethesda, USA
NCI Center for Cancer Research
Louis Staudt
Dr. Staudt received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1976 and his M.D.-Ph.D. degrees in 1982 from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1982. Following Internal Medicine training, he joined Nobel Laureate David Baltimore’s laboratory at the Whitehead Institute as a Jane Coffin Childs Fellow. In 1988, he established his laboratory at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which now focuses on the molecular basis for human lymphoid malignancies and the development of new targeted therapies for these cancers. Dr. Staudt is currently Chief of the Lymphoid Malignancies Branch and Director of the NCI Center for Cancer Genomics. He has received numerous awards for his research and has been elected to the AACR Academy, the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine.
David Weinstock
Boston, USA
Dana Farber Center
David Weinstock
Dr. David Weinstock is the Lavine Family Professor at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics Harvard Medical School. He completed fellowship training in Medical Oncology and Infectious Diseases at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He joined the staff of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2008, where he is a medical oncologist and directs the Weinstock Laboratory, a translational research program focused on novel therapeutics for lymphoid malignancies. He developed the Public Repository of Xenografts (http://www.PRoXe.org), which shares >800 patient-derived xenograft models around the world. He leads the Leukemia Program for the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. He has mentored several junior scientists who now lead their own scientific groups at Harvard and elsewhere.
Adrian Wiestner
Bethesda, USA
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
Adrian Wiestner
Dr. Adrian Wiestner leads the Laboratory of Lymphoid Malignancies, Hematology Branch, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, NIH. Dr. Wiestner earned his M.D. from the University of Basel Medical School in Switzerland in 1992, and he received his Ph.D. in genetics in 1998. He joined the NIH with the NHLBI Hematology Fellowship Program in 2000. In September 2004, Dr. Wiestner was appointed as a Tenure Track Investigator with the NHLBI Hematology Branch and was promoted to Senior Investigator in December 2013. Dr. Wiestner combines clinical and laboratory investigation in B-cell malignancies, in particular Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) and Mantle Cell Lymphoma (MCL). The aim of his program are to identify pathogenic mechanisms and test targeted therapies in clinical trials. An important aspect of his work is to identify resistance mechanisms to current therapies by analyzing the changes in tumor biology during treatment in patients.
Wyndham Wilson
Bethesda, USA
NCI Center for Cancer Research
Wyndham Wilson
Dr. Wilson obtained his MD and PhD and completed his medical residency at Stanford University. Following a fellowship in Medical Oncology at the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Wilson joined the faculty of the National Cancer Institute as the Special Assistant to the Director, and later as a principal investigator. Dr. Wilson is currently the Chief, Lymphoid Malignancies Therapeutic Section and Deputy Chief, Lymphoid Malignancies Branch, Cancer Research Center, National Cancer Institute, NIH. His interests are in the study of the biology and treatment of lymphoid malignancies and he directs phase I, II and III translational studies. His work has focused on translational science in lymphoid malignancies included development of targeted agents and the development of novel therapeutic strategies. He has a special interest in the treatment of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and EBV-driven lymphoproliferative disorders. He has developed novel treatments for subtypes of large cell lymphoma, Burkitt lymphoma and Lymphomatoid Granulomatosis.
