Key Note Speaker

Marcel Salathé

Marcel Salathé is a digital epidemiologist and a professor at EPFL. He is the co-director of the EPFL AI Center. Until 2024, he was the president of the steering committee of the National Research Program on COVID-19 of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He was a member of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Taskforce, where he led the “Digital Epidemiology” expert group. He was also a member of the DP-3T group whose work provided the foundation of the Apple & Google Exposure Notification API which powers decentralized digital contact tracing apps around the world. Marcel co-founded one of Europe’s larges AI conference, the Applied Machine Learning Days.

Vortragstitel: Wissenschaft im KI-Zeitalter
In der Eröffnungs-Plenarsitzung am Freitag, 11.10.2024 in der Zeit von 17:15–19:00 Uhr

Antoni Ribas

Antoni Ribas, MD, PhD, is professor of medicine, surgery, and molecular and medical pharmacology at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), director of the Tumor Immunology Program at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center (JCCC) and director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI) Center at UCLA. His research is focused on laboratory and clinical studies to address primary and acquired resistance to immunotherapy and targeted therapies for melanoma, and in the development of gene-engineered adoptive T cell transfer therapies for cancer. He has been instrumental in the clinical development of several agents approved by the FDA, including the first anti-PD-1 pembrolizumab (Keytruda), two combinations of BRAF and MEK inhibitors vemurafenib (Zelboraf) and cobimetinib (Cotellic), dabrafenib (Tafinlar) and trametinib (Mekinist), and was involved in the development of the first CD19 CAR for lymphoma axicabtagene ciloleucel (Yescarta). He is a past president of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), an elected Fellow of the AACR Academy, the Royal Academy of Medicine of Catalonia, the American Society of Clinical Investigation, and the National Academy of Medicine.

Vortragstitel: Treating melanoma with the immune system
In der Plenarsitzung am Samstag, 12.10.2024 in der Zeit von 10:00–11:30 Uhr

Catherine J. Wu

Catherine J. Wu, MD is a Professor of Medicine and Chief, Division of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies and the Lavine Family Chair for Preventative Care Therapies at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the Association of American Physicians. She received her M.D. from Stanford University School of Medicine and completed her clinical training in Internal Medicine and Hematology-Oncology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA. She joined the staff at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2000. Her research program at DFCI has consistently focused on addressing a fundamental feature of cancer: its genomic heterogeneity–providing a means to evolve, adapt and escape from immune control. At the same time, she has studied the adaptive immune system, which is inherently engineered to be exquisitely responsive to environmental challenges, possessing fundamental ‘search and destroy’ functions and the capacity to provide long-term protective immunologic memory, of cancer patients. Her central focus has been
thus to understand the molecular basis of tumor-host coevolution, both with natural cancer progression and with therapeutic perturbation. These have been primarily genomics based studies to systematically analyze model systems and human specimens, conducted most extensively in blood malignancies such as chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).

Vortragstitel: Genomics of CLL: from driver discovery to functional interrogation
In der Plenarsitzung am Samstag, 12.10.2024 in der Zeit von 10:00–11:30 Uhr