Speaker introductions
Keynote speaker, Stéphanie Lheureux, MD, PhD
Dr Lheureux is a Clinician Investigator at the Cancer Clinical Research Unit (CCRU) at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto, Canada. Dr Lheureux obtained her MD in Medical Oncology and PhD in translational research from France and moved to Toronto for a Clinical Research Fellowship to focus on Gynecological Cancers and Drug Development. She is Site Lead, Gynecologic Oncology and Clinician Investigator at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and holds an Assistant Professor position in the Faculty of Medicine, at the University of Toronto. She serves as co-Chair of the NCI Cervical Task Force on Clinical Trials and has served as a member of the Steering Committee on Uterine Cancers. She is Principal Investigator of several international studies and involved in the development of early phase clinical trials with an emphasis on drug development and translational research in gynecologic malignancies.
Her academic interest is the design and development of early phase clinical trials of targeted agents in gynecologic cancers that incorporate translational endpoints and quality of life measures. This includes but is not limited to examination of chemoprevention approaches, targeted or precision therapies, immune-oncology agents, as well as leading improvements in quality of advanced cancer care. Academically, these interests have included interrogating extreme outliers of response and resistance across the disease continuum as a means of identifying predictors of therapeutic response. In particular, deep analysis of BRCA1/2 mutations in gynecologic cancers of high grade serous histology. Read more from Dr Lheureux’s University Health Network web page.
Johanna Hynninen, MD, PhD
Dr Hynninen received her MD and PhD degrees from the University of Turku, Finland, in 1998 and 2015. She is a specialist in gynaecologic oncology at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Turku University Central Hospital (Tyks) and an adjunct professor at the University of Turku. Dr Hynninen has over ten years of clinical experience in ovarian cancer surgery and chemotherapy and a strong background in performing translational and clinical research.
In the HERCULES project, she has been coordinating the patient sample collection and treatment suggestions. Read more from Dr Hynninen’s University of Turku web page.
Krister Wennerberg, PhD, Prof.
Prof. Wennerberg is a group leader and professor at the Biotech Research and Innovation Centre (BRIC), University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He also leads a research group at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), University of Helsinki, Finland. His research group aims to functionally and therapeutically stratify cancers, to identify the underlying signals that drive them, and how effective personalized drug combinations can be predicted and established.
To accomplish this, the Wennerberg research group uses high throughput approaches to study primary and early passage cancer cells and their drug responses and relate that to their molecular characteristics. You can read more at the Wennerberg group’s University of Copenhagen web pages.
In the HERCULES project, Wennerberg group’s main task has been to study drug responses in patient derived ovarian cancer cells.
Anna Vähärautio, PhD
Dr Vähärautio received her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Kuopio, Finland, in 2008, and started her own research group at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Medicine, Finland, in 2015 after a post-doctoral period in Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. Her research group explores treatment resistance in ovarian cancer by employing single-cell transcriptomics. In addition to high-resolution analysis of longitudinal fresh tumor specimens, her research group applies genome editing and lineage tracing methodologies to explore the mechanistic bases and dynamics of emerging therapy resistance. Read more from the Vähärautio group’s web pages.
In the HERCULES project, Vähärautio group has been in charge of the single-cell studies on patient derived ovarian cancer samples.
Sampsa Hautaniemi, DTech, Prof.
Prof. Hautaniemi is a research group leader and professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki. He received his doctoral degree in computer science from Tampere University of Technology, Finland, in 2003, followed by a postdoctoral period at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. His group focuses on understanding and finding effective means to overcome drug resistance in cancers. Read more from the Hautaniemi group web pages.
Prof. Hautaniemi coordinates the HERCULES consortium and his group has been in charge of genomics analyses, method development for genomics and data visualization in the project.