Eloisa Jantus Lewintre is an Associate Professor of Cell Biology at the Department of Biotechnology, Polytechnic University of Valencia, and the head of the Molecular Oncology Laboratory, eOM Research group at General University Hospital of Valencia Research Foundation. She is a member of the Executive Board of the International Society of Liquid Biopsy (ISLB) and the Director of Master of Biomedical Biotechnology at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Her main research interest is the discovery of new minimally invasive diagnostic, prognostic and predictive molecular biomarkers in cancer. Her research group has expertise in establishing 3D lung cancer patient-derived organoids to explore the tumor microenvironment’s biology and to test innovative therapeutic approaches in lung cancer. Currently, she leads national and international projects focused on developing new techniques in liquid biopsy and, more specifically, circulating free nucleic acids. Dr. Jantus has authored more than 150 scientific articles in peer review and high-impact journals in the oncology field.

A. Personal Statement Currently, I am principal investigator of Liquid Biopsy and Cancer Interception group ( LiqBiopCI) in the University Hospital Virgen de las Nieves and GENyO centre in Granada and associated professor at the Pathological Anatomy department of the University of Granada. My trajectory is based on oncological research and mainly focused on the area of liquid biopsy. During my career I have made different stays in Spain (Bilbao, Pamplona, Barcelona) and abroad (Tromso Norway). I am author of more than 50 articles, about the exciting field of Liquid Biopsy, standing out: The Lancet Oncology, 2012. Breast Cancer Research, 2012. Scientific reports (Nature) 2015, or Oncotarget 2017, Breast cancer Research 2019 , Critical Review in oncology and haematology 2019 or Cancer discovery, or more recently Theranostics 2021, among other. Currently, I lead national as international projects, including the H2020 project ( LiqBiopsens), FIS 21/00786 (Role of platelets in the induction and potentiation of malignant features in lung tumor disease) or regional projects from Andalusian government . These projects are focused on the study of circulating tumor cells, platelets and cell free tumor DNA in different solid tumors. In addition, currently I lead a national project funded by European commission to clinical implementation of LB in the Andalusian Hospitals (Innovative public purchase). Results of these projects have generated internationally licensed patents, the last of these patents is focused in a new methodology to detect circulating pulmonary cells in COPD patients. Work carried out by her group has been recognized by the Health Ministry and the Andalusian Health Service (SAS). I am also co-founder and currently vicepresident of the international society of liquid biopsy (ISLB)

Biography Narrative 2022 David R. Gandara, MD David Gandara, Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of California, Davis is Director of Thoracic Oncology and the Senior Advisor to the Director and Director of Thoracic Oncology at UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. He was recently appointed Adjunct Clinical Professor, Translational and Clinical Research Program at the University of Hawaii Cancer Center and Chief Medical Officer for International Society of Liquid Biopsy (ISLB), a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the science and clinical application of liquid biopsy in cancer diagnosis and therapy. He is an internationally known clinician-scientist and lung cancer thought leader and has published over 450 peer-reviewed papers. He has led many notable research projects in lung cancer, including early therapeutics trials through an N01-sponsored award, cooperative group trials as past-chair of the SWOG Lung Committee and multi-institutional translational science projects such as clinical director of the patient-derived xenograft (PDX) lung program in collaboration with The Jackson Laboratory Cancer Center. Dr. Gandara has been selected for many awards and honors, including the lifetime Scientific Award from the International Association for Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC), the Team Science Award from the Addario Lung Cancer Foundation and the Trajectory Achievement Award from the ISLB. He is current principal investigator for a National Cancer Institute UG1 award to UCDCCC for cancer clinical trials, co-leader of Lung MAP, a unique NCI-sponsored public-private partnership for new drug development in lung cancer and is founding co-chair and current member of the NCI-directed Investigational Drug Steering Committee (IDSC). Dr. Gandara is past Editor-in-Chief of the journal Clinical Lung Cancer. He served as president of the IASLC from 2009-2011 and as treasurer from 2013-2017. Is a prior member of the board of directors and secretary-treasurer of ASCO. In 2017, Gandara received the Giants of Cancer Care Award in lung cancer.

Postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Thoracic Oncology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY. My research focuses in the study of liquid biopsy biomarkers in lung cancer, particularly in the role of circulating tumor cells, extracellular vesicles, cytokines, and other blood components in the development of treatment resistance and metastasis.

Upon completing her PhD studies, Professor Dive moved to Aston University's School of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Birmingham (England), where she established her own group studying mechanisms of drug induced tumour cell death, before moving to The University of Manchester to continue this research. Caroline was awarded a Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine Research Fellowship before joining the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute in 2003. She is the Director of the CRUK Manchester Institute Cancer Biomarker Centre, with research spanning tumour biology, preclinical pharmacology, biomarker discovery, biomarker assay validation and clinical qualification to regulatory standards, bioinformatics, biostatistics and most recently, digital clinical trials. Caroline was awarded the Pasteur-Weizmann/Servier International Prize in 2012 for her Biomarker Research, the AstraZeneca Prize for Women in Pharmacology in 2016 and was presented with the 2019 Heine H. Hansen Lectureship Award by the IASLC. She is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2015), Fellow of the British Pharmacological Society (2012) and Fellow of the European Academy of Cancer Sciences (2011). In 2017, Caroline was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her services to cancer research. Most recently, she became an elected member of EMBO (2020), received the first inaugural Johann Anton Merck Award in recognition for exceptional contributions to the field of preclinical oncology (2020), and was the recipient of the Mary J. Matthews Pathology/Translational Distinguished Service Award by IASLC (2021).

Manel Esteller (Sant Boi de Llobregat, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, 1968) graduated in Medicine from the Universidad de Barcelona in 1992, where he also obtained his Ph.D. degree specialising in molecular genetics of endometrial carcinoma, in 1996. He was an Invited Researcher at the School of Biological and Medical Sciences at the University of St. Andrews, (Scotland, UK) during which time his research interests focused on the molecular genetics of inherited breast cancer. From 1997 to 2001, Esteller was a Postdoctoral Fellow and a Research Associate at the Johns Hopkins University and School of Medicine, (Baltimore, USA) where he studied DNA methylation and human cancer. His work was decisive in establishing promoter hypermethylation of tumour suppressor genes as a common hallmark of all human tumours. From October 2001 to September 2008 Manel Esteller was the Leader of the CNIO Cancer Epigenetics Laboratory, where his principal area of research were the alterations in DNA methylation, histone modifications and chromatin in human cancer. Since October 2008 until May 2019, Dr Esteller was the Director of the Cancer Epigenetics and Biology Program (PEBC) in Barcelona. He is the Director of the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC), Chairman of Genetics in the School of Medicine of the University of Barcelona, and an ICREA Research Professor. His current research is devoted to the establishment of the epigenome and epitranscriptome maps of normal and transformed cells, and the development of new epigenetic drugs for cancer therapy. Author of more than 600 original publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, 24 of them categorized as “Highly Cited Paper”. Dr Esteller has the highest total impact factor and the highest number of citations (81,783) among biomedical scientists in Spain. He has an h-Index of 134 by Web of Science – Clarivate Analytics and a h-Index of 166 according to Google Scholar. Dr. Esteller is considered among the Top 0.01% of World Scientists based on Impact by both the Stanford University (METRICS) and the Web of Science Group-Clarivate Analytics. He is also a Member of numerous international scientific societies, Editorial Boards and reviewer for many journals and funding agencies. Dr Esteller is also Associate Editor for Cancer Research, The Lancet Oncology, Carcinogenesis, Genome Research and The Journal of The National Cancer Institute. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Epigenetics. He is also the director of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project for Cancer of Unknown Primary (CUP) (2018-2022) of the National Cancer Institute - National Institutes of Health (NCI-NIH) in the United States (US) and the director of The International Proteogenome Consortium (ICPC) Project “Proteogenomics of B-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia” (2022-2023) also by the NCI. His work has received, among other recognitions, the Carcinogenesis Award (2005), Beckman-Coulter Award (2006), Fondazione Piemontese per la Ricerca sul Cancro (FPRC) Award (2006), Swiss Bridge Award (2006), Innovation Award from the Commonwealth of Massachussets (2007), Human Frontier Science Program Award (2007), DEbiopharm-EPFL Award (2009), Dr. Josef Steiner Cancer Research Award (2009), Lilly Foundation Preclinical Biomedical Research Award (2009), World Health Summit Award (2010), European Research Council Advanced Grant (2011), “Rey Jaime I” Research Award (2013), Severo Ochoa Award in Biomedicine (2014), National Award in Oncology (2014), “Dr Josep Trueta Medal”, Catalan Goverment (2015), National Research Award of the Catalan Goverment (2015), Gold Medal, Parlament of Catalonia (2016), International Award of Catalonia (2016), Falcó Carlemany Award (2017), Innovation in Healthcare Oncology Award (2018), Lansdowne Lecture Award, University of Victoria, Canada (2019), Narcís Monturiol Medal, Catalan Government (2020), Elected Member of the Academia Europaea (2021) and the European Academy of Sciences (2021). In 2022, his discovery of cancer type-specific DNA hypermethylation profiles was selected as a Landmark Article in Cancer Research by the AACR and the National Cancer Act.

Dr. Triparna Sen is an Associate Professor, in the Department of Oncological Sciences, and the Co-Director of the Lung Cancer PDX Platform at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. Dr. Triparna Sen is a cancer biologist with a long-standing interest in mechanisms of tumor development, progression, and drug resistance in cancer. 

The Sen lab focuses on the development of new treatment paradigms for clinically relevant molecular subsets of lung cancer, using genetic and transcriptomic analyses; functional genomics; and patient-derived models of lung cancer. As the Co-Director of the Lung Cancer PDX program at Mount Sinai, which will acquire human samples from the clinic for the development of cancer models and assess experimental cancer therapeutics in the preclinical setting. 

Previously, Dr. Sen identified that DNA damage response (DDR) proteins are effective therapeutic targets for small cell lung cancer treatment and that targeting DDR promotes antitumor immunity through activation of innate immune signaling. In her recent work, Dr. Sen identified molecular determinants and novel therapeutic targets for lineage plasticity in lung cancer:

Dr. Sen has received several prestigious awards including- AAAS Martin and Rose Wachtel Cancer Research Award (2021); 40 under 40 in Cancer- Emerging Leaders Award (2020); AACR Women in Cancer Research Scholar Award; AACR Scholar-in-training award; Jeffrey Lee Cousins fellowship and Immuno-Oncology-Young Investigator award. Dr. Sen is invited to deliver talks and educational sessions at major national and international meetings. Dr. Sen has received independent grant funding from the National Institute of Health (NIH/NCI-R01), Department of Defense (DoD) Lung Cancer Research Program, Lung Cancer Research Foundation (LCRF), and The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC). She is the author of several peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts, and she is an active member of the IASLC, and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). She has authored over 45 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts in high-impact journals. 

Dr. Sen is very active in the lung cancer community. In addition to being an active member, she is also a core member of the Women in Thoracic Oncology working group of IASLC. She works with the Lung Cancer Research Foundation (LCRF) and Lung Cancer Foundation of America (LCFA) to raise lung cancer awareness in the broader community. She works with patient advocates and lung cancer survivors to raise awareness about inclusive clinical trials and raise funding for lung cancer research. She has been featured in Good Morning America and LCFA-Hope with Answers podcasts, where she has spoken about disparities in lung cancer research and treatment. Due to her expertise and contribution, she has been nominated to be the Conference Co-Chair of the Hot Topic: Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC) Meeting supported by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC, October 2021).

Dr. Triparna Sen is an Associate Professor, in the Department of Oncological Sciences, and the Co-Director of the Lung Cancer PDX Platform at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. Dr. Triparna Sen is a cancer biologist with a long-standing interest in mechanisms of tumor development, progression, and drug resistance in cancer.