Speakers in Workshops

Richard Rosenquist Brandell is Professor and Senior Physician at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. He initiated and led the SciLifeLab Clinical Genomics Facility in Uppsala between 2013-2017 and is currently Platform Director for the national Diagnostics Development Platform within SciLifeLab. Dr. Brandell is coordinating the Genomics Medicine Sweden initiative that aims to build a new type of infrastructure within Swedish healthcare that implements precision medicine at a national level. Professor Brandell has made outstanding contributions to our understanding of the mechanisms behind the development of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). His studies have identified novel prognostic and predictive markers, defined new clinically relevant CLL subgroups, as well as provided significantly improved risk stratification at the individual patient level. Rosenquist Brandell’s team has presented compelling evidence for a role of antigens (both autoantigens and microbial antigens) in the pathogenesis of CLL.

Roxana Merino Martinez works as Project Manager at Karolinska Institutet (Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics). She participates in national and EU projects related to informatics infrastructures for biomedical research and biobanking (BioMedBridges, BiobankCloud, RD-Connect, B3Africa). She has background in computer engineering and informatics and her areas of expertise are high-throughput data and bioinformatics, biobank data management, data harmonization and integration, project management from conception to execution and sustaining, as well as teaching at the university level. Roxana is a fervent believer in the creed of open-source, open-access and open-science as the driving forces of contemporary science.

Filip Josephson M.D, Ph.D has been working at the Swedish Medical Products Agency (MPA) since 2008. His main area of prior scientific endeavor and expertise concerns the pharmacology of antiviral agents. As a representative of the MPA at the Committee for Human Medicinal Products (CHMP) as well as the Scientific Advice Working Party (SAWP) of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), he is extensively involved in the regulatory evaluation of medicinal products for oncological diseases as well as in giving scientific advice on the development of such products.

Deepak Khanna is Senior Vice President and Regional President, EMEAC Oncology for MSD. Deepak took on this new role in January 2014 and is responsible for developing MSD & Merck’s oncology capabilities across Europe. Prior to this role, Deepak was SVP and Managing Director of MSD UK and Ireland from 2009-2013, a role which included the integration of MSD with Schering-Plough.

Alongside his role as UK Managing Director, Deepak played an active role in pharmaceutical industry affairs. He held the position of President of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) between April 2012 and April 2014 and oversaw the pricing and reimbursement negotiations with the UK government during his tenure. Prior to this, he was Chair of the American Pharmaceutical Group (APG).

Françoise Meunier served as EORTC Director General from 1991 through 2015 and oversaw the growth of the EORTC into an international world class cancer clinical research infrastructure. Upon stepping down as Director General in 2015, Françoise remains active as EORTC Director Special Projects where she is a driving force behind activities such as EORTC cancer survivorship initiatives. She also lends her valuable experience to fundraising projects and sits on the board of the EORTC Cancer Research Fund.

Prior to joining the EORTC in 1991, Dr. Meunier was Head of Infectious Diseases Department at Institute Jules Bordet in Brussels, Belgium and her personal area of research included the management of infections in patients with Cancer and mainly Invasive Fungal Infections. She has over 150 peer-reviewed published articles.

Marianne Jarfelt is a senior consultant in Paediatric Oncology and Haematology at the Queen Silvia Children´s Hospital, Gothenburg Sweden. Her thesis: Childhood lymphoblastic leukaemia – late effects in adult survivors, was published 2006. Since then, she has increasingly been working with long-term follow-up for survivors of childhood cancer. She is the head of the Swedish working group for long-term follow-up after childhood cancer. She is also the head of the Swedish National guidelines for long-term follow-up after childhood cancer, first published in 2016. In addition, she started a clinic for adult childhood cancer survivors at the Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Gothenburg in 2012.

Maria Weimer is Member of the Swedish Parliament, after a carreer as a diplomat for the Swedish ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In 2016, Maria Weimer was diagnosed with breast cancer. Today, a survivor who shares her reflections of being a patient, a survivor in society.

Cheng-Ho Jimmy Lin is the Chief Scientific Officer, Oncology, at Natera. Most recently, he led the clinical genomics program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Previously, at Johns Hopkins and Washington University, Dr. Lin was part of one of the first clinical genomics labs in academia and led the computational analyses of the first ever exome sequencing studies in cancer, including breast, colorectal, pancreatic, glioblastoma, and melanoma. He has published in top academic journals, such as Science, Nature, and Cell, and has been an expert in national and international media outlets, such as New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, Washington Post, and the Financial Times. Dr. Lin holds an MHS in Bioinformatics, a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Medicine, and an MD from Johns Hopkins University as well dual majors in Cognitive Science and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University.

Chand Khanna, DVM, PhD is a board-certified diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (Oncology) and was recently awarded honorary membership as a Diplomate of the American College Veterinary Pathology. Following this clinical specialization Dr. Khanna received a PhD in Pathobiology from the University of Minnesota and then completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Pediatric Oncology Branch of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda Maryland. Dr. Khanna has maintained a strong connection to the field of veterinary oncology and animal health. He continues to be an active clinician within his referral oncology practices, The Oncology Service, LLC, based in the greater Washington DC area. He is founder of Animal Clinical Investigation LLC, a contract research company, involved in complex medical problems seen in pet animals. Dr. Khanna is Chief Science Officer with EthosVeterinary Health, and President of Ethos Discovery501c3, its incubator of scientific innovation.

Didier Meulendiijks is a PharmD and clinical pharmacologist. He works as a clinical assessor of oncology drugs at the Dutch Medicines Evaluation Board. He is involved in the Oncology Working Party at the European Medicines Agency (EMA) as well as the EMA Big Data Task Force. He has a background in clinical and clinical pharmacological research at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, where he worked on developing biomarkers to predict response to chemotherapy.

Bengt Sandblad is Professor Emeritus in human-computer interaction at Uppsala University. His research has mainly focused on development of information systems in work life, usability and digital work environment problems. He has e.g. developed methods for user centered design, vision seminar processes and evaluation of digital work environment. Applications can be found in health care, administrative work and in traffic control.

Martijn Stuiver works as a clinical epidemiologist at the Center for Quality of Life of the Netherlands Cancer Institute. He is also Associate professor of Functional Recovery from Cancer and its treatment at the Faculty of Health of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and senior university lecturer Evidence Based Practice in Healthcare at the Faculty of Health, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam. His research focusses on cancer rehabilitation, in particular the role of physical exercise. Martijn Stuiver is also board member of the Onconet foundation, which strives to improve quality and accessibility of physical therapy supported exercise interventions for patients with cancer.

Šarūnas Narbutas is a professional lawyer, political advisor, corporate consultant and a patient advocate. Until 2017, Šarūnas Narbutas served as a political advisor to the President of the Republic of Lithuania. He was also closely involved with Presidential oversight of the e-health strategy carried out by Lithuanian Ministry of Health and monitoring of the activities of Lithuanian Centre of Registers. Before joining the President’s team in 2014, Mr. Narbutas was a member of an Advisory Board of Lithuanian Minister of Health, where he was involved in the design of e-health solutions. In 2017 Šarūnas became a board member at National e-Health Management Board, was elected Chairman of Governmental Fund on Public Health, Vice-Chairman of “Lithuanian Patient’s Forum” and became a member of “National Health Council”. Since 2013 he is acting as a President of “Lithuanian Cancer Patient Coalition” (POLA), is a Co-Founder of “Youth Cancer Europe”, Co-Founder of “Global Action for Cancer Patients”.

Mike Kelly is Professor and Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the Institute of Public Health at the University of Cambridge and a member of St John’s College, Cambridge. Between 2005 and 2014 he was the Director of the Centre for Public Health at the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) where he led the teams producing public health guidelines.

From 2005 to 2007 he directed the methodology work stream for the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. He has a continuing interest in health inequalities and is pursuing a programme of research in Cambridge on this topic. He had an academic career lasting twenty seven years before moving into the National Health Service to lead the Research Team at the Health Development Agency and then moving on to NICE.

Stefan James is Professor of Cardiology at Uppsala University and Scientific Director of Uppsala Clinical Research Center. He is a Senior Interventional Cardiologist at Uppsala University Hospital Sweden. He has previously held positions at the Karolinska Hospital and Duke Clinical Research Institute, Duke University. Professor James co-chaired the previous and current 2017 ESC guidelines for ST-elevation myocardial infarction, co-author of several of the recent European guidelines on ACS and revascularization. Stefan James has served as PI on steering committees for numerous international trials in cardiology including PLATO, Early-ACS trial, EVOLUTION, APPRAISE II, GUSTO IV-ACS, GEMINI and THEMIS. He has served as the chairman of the Swedish Coronary and Angioplasty registry and a member of the steering committee of SWEDEHEART. He has pioneered the concept of registry based randomized clinical trials and served as the study chair for large outcome trials TASTE and VALIDATE.

Pan Pantziarka, is the Program Director for Drug Repurposing at the Anticancer Fund and the coordinator of the Repurposing Drugs in Oncology (ReDO) project (www.redo-project.org), an international collaboration between the Anticancer Fund and the US not-for-profit GlobalCures. In addition to publishing papers on specific non-cancer drugs with the potential to be repurposed for oncological use, the ReDO project is engaged on cancer policy work related to drug licensing and similar issues. Other research interests include the rare genetic cancer condition Li Fraumeni Syndrome (LFS) and the development of computational models of tumour growth. Pan is also the co-founder and Chairman of the George Pantziarka TP53 Trust (www.tp53.org.uk), a UK-based patient advocacy and support organisation for sufferers LFS.