Dr. Ata Abbas is a Research Scientist in the Division of Hematology and Oncology, Department of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University and an Associate Member of Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, Cleveland, Ohio. He has expertise in the areas of global transcriptional regulation, epigenetics, and genomics with a solid background in immunobiology. His current research is focused on 1) the identification of genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic signatures in SCLC metastases, and 2) understanding the mechanisms that SCLC utilizes to escape immune surveillance and to develop effective immunotherapeutic approaches to treat this highly metastatic malignancy.

Upon completing her PhD studies in Cambridge, Professor Caroline Dive moved to Aston University's School of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Birmingham 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 (CRUK MI) in 2003. Currently, she is Interim Director of the Institute and Director of its Cancer Biomarker Centre, with research spanning tumour biology, biomarker discovery and preclinical pharmacology alongside regulated laboratories for biomarker assay validation and qualification within clinical trials to Good Clinical Practice standards supporting clinical decision-making. 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 International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC). 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 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). Caroline is the current President of the European Association for Cancer Research (2020 – 2022).

Dr. Ralph DeBerardinis joined the faculty of UT Southwestern Medical Center in 2008 and joined the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UTSW (CRI) shortly after its founding in 2012. He is Chief of Pediatric Genetics and Metabolism at UTSW and Director of the Genetic and Metabolic Disease Program at CRI. Dr. DeBerardinis is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and has received numerous awards including the William K. Bowes, Jr. Award in Medical Genetics, the National Cancer Institute’s Outstanding Investigator Award and The Academy of Medicine, Engineering & Science of Texas’s Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Medicine. He has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine and the Association of American Physicians. Dr. DeBerardinis’ laboratory studies the role of altered metabolic pathways in human diseases, including cancer and pediatric inborn errors of metabolism. The lab has pioneered the use of metabolomics and isotope tracing to characterize disease-associated metabolic states directly in patients, and to use disease-relevant model systems to explore how metabolic perturbations contributes to tissue dysfunction. Work from the DeBerardinis laboratory has produced new insights into disease mechanisms in numerous metabolic diseases, including by defining unexpected fuel preferences in human cancer and uncovering new metabolic vulnerabilities in cancer cells. Dr. DeBerardinis received a Bachelor of Science in Biology from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia before earning M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine. He completed his post-graduate clinical training at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) in Pediatrics, Medical Genetics and Clinical Biochemical Genetics. Before coming to UT Southwestern, he performed postdoctoral research at the Penn Cancer Center.

Dr. Haobin Chen received his Ph.D. degree at New York University and completed his medical oncology fellowship at NCI. He has been a Physician Scientist Early Investigator at NCI since 2016.

Dr. Chan completed his MD/PhD at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he studied computational biology and developed new methods to model the topology of viral evolution and identify recurrent FGFR-TACC fusions in glioblastoma multiforme. He is currently an Instructor in the Thoracic Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where he aims to leverage single-cell technologies and machine learning to understand how neuroendocrine lineage plasticity in lung and prostate cancer mediates metastasis and therapeutic resistance, and how the tumor microenvironment can fuel this tumor-intrinsic process.

Lauren Averett Byers, MD, MS is an Associate Professor in the Department of Thoracic and Head and Neck Medical Oncology and an Andrew Sabin Family Fellow at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. She completed her B.A. degree in Molecular Biology at Princeton University, her M.D. at Baylor College of Medicine, and M.S. in Patient-Based Research at the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She is a member of the National Cancer Institute’s Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC) Consortium and serves on the NCI’s Thoracic Malignancy Steering Committee and SCLC Working Group. Dr. Byers’ laboratory is focused on the molecular profiling of small cell lung cancer and the development of new treatments and predictive biomarkers, particularly as they pertain to drugs targeting DNA damage repair (DDR) and immunotherapy. As a direct extension of work completed in her lab, she has led multiple clinical trials for patients with lung cancer. In addition to an outstanding publication record of over 100 peer reviewed manuscripts, Dr. Byers has earned multiple honors including two AACR The Best of AACR Journals Awards, the MD Anderson President’s Recognition for Faculty Excellence - Research Excellence Award, and most recently, membership of The American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI). As a physician-scientist, her landmark research led to the identification of fundamental differences in the molecular wiring of SCLC, including the identification of PARP1 and other DNA damage repair (DDR) proteins as novel therapeutic targets for SCLC. Building on this, her group also identified a new role of DDR inhibitors in activating the innate immune system, whereby dramatically enhancing response to immune checkpoint blockade in preclinical models. Recently, her team has defined molecularly distinct subtypes of SCLC that predict response to targeted therapy and immunotherapy and uncovered tumor heterogeneity as a driver of resistance using innovative, patient-derived models (published in Cancer Cell 2021 and Nature Cancer 2020).

Dr. Barbie is a Thoracic Medical Oncologist in the Lowe Center for Thoracic Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is also Associate Director of the Belfer Center for Applied Cancer Science, as well as an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. Dr. Barbie earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard College and M.D. degree at Harvard Medical School, and was a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator Program Medical Student Research Fellow in Dr. Edward Harlow’s laboratory at the MGH Cancer Center. He then completed an MGH internal medicine resident and chief medical residency, a Dana-Farber Partners Oncology fellowship, and performed his post-doctoral work in Dr. William Hahn’s laboratory at DFCI and the Broad Institute. Currently he is principal investigator of his own laboratory at DFCI while also seeing patients in the Lowe Center for Thoracic Oncology. Dr. Barbie’s research has had a strong translational focus, studying the role of innate immunity in lung cancer. His early collaborations with Gilead Sciences led to the first TBK1 inhibitor trials using a repurposed multitargeted JAK inhibitor. He was principal investigator of a multicenter lung cancer clinical trial using this first-generation drug and his work also led to similar studies in colorectal and pancreatic cancer. Currently his laboratory is developing ways to co-opt TBK1 signaling to drive an antiviral response that can boost the impact of cancer immunotherapies. As a fellow he was the recipient of an ASCO Young Investigator award and NIH K08 grant. Since starting his laboratory he has also received an ASCI Young Physician Scientist Award and was elected as an ASCI Member in 2019. Currently he is a principal or co-principal investigator on multiple NIH grants including an R01, P01, and 2 U01 grants. He has also received significant funding from the V Foundation, SU2C, the Mark Foundation, the Ludwig Center, and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

My research program is dedicated to the study of small cell lung cancer (SCLC), a highly aggressive and lethal neuroendocrine tumor type characterized by rapid growth and widespread metastasis. Using cell biology, mouse genetics and cutting-edge molecular biology approaches, my laboratory will dissect the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms underlying small cell lung cancer initiation, progression, and response to therapies.

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