Thermo Fisher Scientific at ECP 2017 Congress

Prof. Egbert Smit has been Professor of Pulmonary Medicine at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Department of Thoracic Oncology, since 2014, and since 1997 has worked in the Department of Pulmonary Diseases at the VU University Medical Center, both in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He received his PhD at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, for a multidisciplinary study in medical oncology, genetics, and pulmonary medicine in 1990, and was board certified in pulmonology in 1997. Prof. Smit has been involved in basic research and clinical trials ranging from chemoprevention of lung cancer to treatment of advanced disease in (non-) small-cell lung cancers. He has been Principal Investigator of several national and international phase 2 and 3 trials. In the past decade, the focus of his research has been on translational oncology and molecular imaging. He has more than 300 publications in peer-reviewed journals and chapters in books, and is active in several national and international societies, including the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC), the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC), the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). Prof. Smit served as Chair of a multidisciplinary task force for the development of clinical guidelines in small-cell lung cancer in the Netherlands. He is on the review board of several major oncology journals and has co-organised several national meetings on thoracic oncology.

Dr Quagliata is Senior Director of the Contract R&D Unit at the Institute of Medical Genetics and Pathology, care of the University Hospital Basel. Dr Quagliata is formally trained in medical biotechnology with a PhD in vascular medicine. Since he moved back to Switzerland from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at National Institute of Health (NIH in Bethesda, USA), Dr Quagliata established the NGS technology at his current institution in Basel. There is also leading the operations of Molecular Diagnostics Team and the newly established at Contract R&D Unit. Dr Quagliata has been among the first in Europe introducing next-generation sequencing (NGS) in routine molecular diagnostics (with now thousands of samples analysed using NGS) and applied it to the analysis of liquid biopsy with the ultimate goal of enabling precision medicine.

Dr Stephen Finn is a Pathologist with subspecialist expertise in cancer molecular diagnostics. He is a Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investigator and co-director of the Cancer Molecular Diagnostic Laboratory at St James’s Hospital and associate professor of pathology at the University of Dublin, Trinity College. Dr Finn qualified from University College, Cork (UCC) in 1998, completed his higher professional training in Dublin in 2005 and subsequently worked as Staff Pathologist and Senior Scientist at the Centre for Molecular Oncologic Pathology (CMOP) at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, USA. He has PhD from Trinity College Dublin (2005) and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, UK and a Fellow of the Faculty of Pathology of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. Dr Finn is a founding member of the Transdisciplinary Prostate Cancer Partnership (ToPCaP) and is a member of the European Thoracic Oncology Platform (ETOP). Dr Finn’s primary research interests are focused on aspects of lung and prostate cancer, including obesity and metabolic syndrome in prostate cancer progression, the molecular significance of dietary and exercise interventions, noncoding RNA signatures of advanced prostate cancer, the utility of circulating tumour cells as a liquid biopsy in prostate and lung cancers.

Prof. Michael Hummel is Head of the Molecular Pathology Diagnostic Unit and Professor of Experimental Hematopathology at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany, a position he has held since 1993. He earned his PhD degree in biochemistry at the Free University of Berlin in 1990 and his habilitation in molecular and experimental pathology at the University Hospital Benjamin Franklin, Free University Berlin (Charité Berlin) in 1995. He runs the lymphoma tissue bank within the Competence Network Malignant Lymphomas (Cologne, Germany) and is Head of the Central Biobank at the Charité (ZeBanC) and the BIH Core Facility Biobank at the Berlin Institute of Health. Prof. Hummel has wide-ranging research interests with a particular focus on malignant lymphoma, epigenetic mechanisms, molecular pathogenesis and reprogramming, and high throughput technologies. He is a member of various advisory boards and medical/research societies, the Associate Editor for BMC Cancer, and a reviewer for several journals and funding organisations. Prof. Hummel has published more than 320 articles in peer-reviewed journals such as the American Journal of Transplantation, Leukemia, and the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr Fernando López-Ríos is Director of the Targeted Therapies Laboratory at the Hospital Universitario HM Sanchinarro in Madrid (Spain) and Professor of Pathology and Molecular Pathology at Universidad CEU San Pablo also in Madrid. He received his medical degree and PhD in Madrid from the Faculty of Medicine at Autónoma University and Complutense University respectively, and completed his residency in pathology at the University Hospital ‘12 de Octubre’ in Madrid. Dr López-Ríos has also been a visiting researcher at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA. His main clinical and research expertise is in cancer biomarker testing with a special emphasis in lung cancer and mesothelioma.