Madrid and continued my training at Hospital La Paz in Madrid where I established a program of translational cancer research focused on biomarkers identification. At Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, I acquired extensive experience in cancer epigenetics and have contributed to cancer subclassification and to the characterization of intratumor heterogeneity based on chromatin analysis. I also have vast experience developing methodologies including methods for single-cell interrogation of tissues and for chromatin profiling of FFPE clinical samples. My goal is to apply my knowledge and high-resolution methodologies to rigorously investigate well-annotated clinical cohorts to advance in the understanding of cancer progression and treatment resistance. I am a very collaborative researcher always interested in partnering with research groups in academia and industry to translate biology to clinical applications.
Lakshmi Kuttippurathu is an accomplished interdisciplinary scientist with 15+ years of experience in Computational Biology. During her research career at Harvard MIT Health Science and Technology, Lakshmi developed a computational tool to study regulatory dynamics of transcription factors. As a postdoctoral fellow and later as a Faculty at Thomas Jefferson University, she contributed to the field of Liver regeneration and Neuroscience with focus on understanding regulatory network dynamics driven by perturbations, using Systems Biology approach. Currently, she is the Associate Director, Computational Biology and Data Sciences at Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, where she is spearheading the computational efforts on developing and implementing a strategy for preclinical target discovery.
Assieh Saadatpour is Associate Director of Biomarker Analytics for the Lung Cancer Initiative at Johnson and Johnson. Her team leverages the power of computational genomics and data science to help discover novel biomarkers and identify cancer patient populations that best respond to different therapies. Before joining J&J, Assieh was an Associate Principal Scientist at Merck Research Lab where she led and supported immuno-oncology computational projects at different stages of drug discovery and development. Prior to joining the pharmaceutical industry, she was a Research Fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health working on single cell genomics area.
Ian Pike is the Chief Scientific Officer at Proteome Sciences and has over 30 years’ experience working in the diagnostics and biotechnology sectors. Since joining Proteome Sciences in 2002 he has held a number of roles covering intellectual property management, business development, operational management and is now focused on leading the Company’s scientific strategy to offer clients a flexible, high-quality service.
Joost has worked in the biotechnology industry for 10+ years as computational biology lead on drug/ target discovery programs and platforms (biomarkers/precision medicine in neurodegeneration and in immuno-oncology) as well as in biomanufacturing (upstream process/cell line development for biopharmaceuticals and renewable chemicals), at Sonata Therapeutics, Biogen, and DSM(-Firmenich).
Madrid and continued my training at Hospital La Paz in Madrid where I established a program of translational cancer research focused on biomarkers identification. At Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, I acquired extensive experience in cancer epigenetics and have contributed to cancer subclassification and to the characterization of intratumor heterogeneity based on chromatin analysis. I also have vast experience developing methodologies including methods for single-cell interrogation of tissues and for chromatin profiling of FFPE clinical samples. My goal is to apply my knowledge and high-resolution methodologies to rigorously investigate well-annotated clinical cohorts to advance in the understanding of cancer progression and treatment resistance. I am a very collaborative researcher always interested in partnering with research groups in academia and industry to translate biology to clinical applications.
Lakshmi Kuttippurathu is an accomplished interdisciplinary scientist with 15+ years of experience in Computational Biology. During her research career at Harvard MIT Health Science and Technology, Lakshmi developed a computational tool to study regulatory dynamics of transcription factors. As a postdoctoral fellow and later as a Faculty at Thomas Jefferson University, she contributed to the field of Liver regeneration and Neuroscience with focus on understanding regulatory network dynamics driven by perturbations, using Systems Biology approach. Currently, she is the Associate Director, Computational Biology and Data Sciences at Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, where she is spearheading the computational efforts on developing and implementing a strategy for preclinical target discovery.
Tom Lanz is a neurobiologist with training in several areas including biochemistry, cell biology, molecular biology and bioinformatics with over 20 years of drug discovery experience and 40 publications. His work in Neuroscience ranged from advancing Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease portfolio projects and leading biomarker efforts to leading project teams focused on novel genomics-driven psychiatric targets. Tom currently leads the Multi-Omics and Biomarkers group within Pfizer Drug Safety Research & Development. This group applies next-gen omics solutions to identify biomarkers, deconvolute mechanisms of efficacy or toxicity, understand preclinical model translation, and a variety of other questions that arise during all phases of drug development.
Ani received his PhD from Rutgers University in Chemical Biology. His thesis was focused on the application of nanomaterials for controlling neural stem cell behavior. He followed that up with a postdoc at MIT and Harvard Medical School where he worked on immunotherapy and drug delivery. Ani has held multiple commercial positions at Akoya and is now Senior Manager of Global Market Development. Prior to joining Akoya’s commercial team, Ani was a Field Applications Scientist with the Quantitative Pathology Group at PerkinElmer.
PhD in Biochemistry with academic and twenty plus years of pharmaceutical drug discovery & development experience from target identification through clinical development, submission, approval, launch & post-marketing. Specialized in Translational Sciences, Clinical BioAnalytics, Biomarkers & Diagnostics for Immunology, Immuno-Oncology, Inflammation, GI/Metabolic, Fibrosis, Hematology, Neuromuscular, and Rare Genetic diseases at Wyeth, Pfizer, Takeda (L-Shire) and Biogen. Currently Head of Clinical Bioanalytics & Translational Sciences at Beam Therapeutics managing a function that works across R&D and holds responsibility for bioanalytical, forward & reverse translational strategies followed by implementation for a broad pipeline of clinical programs in hematology, immunology, oncology, and rare genetic diseases that leverage base editing technologies, auto/allo cell therapies and novel delivery modalities like LNP.
Arpan Ghosh, Ph.D., is the Single Cell Team Lead at Dyno Therapeutics. With over 19 years of research experience, Arpan leverages his expertise in molecular biology, advanced genomics methods and cellular biology to enable discovery of novel AAV variants with improved tissue and cellular targeting properties. Prior to joining Dyno, Arpan helped commercialize MERFISH based spatial transcriptomics as a Scientist at Vizgen Inc. Before joining Vizgen, Arpan’s postdoctoral research at the Harvard Medical School focused on activityinduced myokines and their physiological impacts. During his Ph.D. Arpan made seminal contributions to the understanding of the role of cytokines like TGF-β in regulating cellular metabolism
Pascaline Mary is the Senior Director, Head of Single Cell Science at HiFiBiO Therapeutics leading a unique single-cell platform to develop novel applications for accelerated drug discovery and development. She is a scientific leader with extensive experience in single-cell based technologies. Previously, Pascaline worked as the director of assay development at Pattern Bioscience, a biotech developing a diagnostic platform that delivers rapid pathogen identification and antibiotic susceptibility test. Prior to Pattern, Pascaline worked at GnuBIO (acquired by Bio-Rad), where she contributed to the development of a microfluidic-based next generation DNA sequencer.
Dr. Asaf Rotem, Senior Director in Translational Medicine, leads the Center for Single Cell Studies (CSCS) in AstraZeneca Early Oncology. Dr. Rotem worked in roles of increasing responsibility: Research Scientist at Rambam Medical Center, Department of Pathology, Israel; Research Scientist at Artemis Pharmaceuticals, Israel; Postdoc and then Instructor in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School; cross-appointment at The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Cancer Program and Klarman Cell Observatory; Head of Innovation Lab (2015-18) and Associate Director (2018-19) for the Center for Cancer Precision Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Rotem has also served as an advisor to several start-up companies such as eGenesis, Cambridge MA; NucleAI, Tel-Aviv, Israel; and Celsius Therapeutics, Cambridge MA and in the past has consulted for and served on the board of several other companies and organizations. Dr. Rotem has published several high impact publications in the field of single cell genomics in the last few years and co-chaired a work group at the Human Tumor Atlas Network (HTAN), NCI Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot Initiative.
Ajay Nair’s research is focused on developing computational techniques to identify cellular regulatory interactions from high-throughput data. He completed his engineering master’s degree from IIT-Delhi holding first rank and Joint-PhD in Computational Biology from IIT-Bombay and Monash University, Australia. His postdoc training was with Prof. Andrea Califano and Prof. Robert Schwabe at Columbia University. Ajay and his team have identified regulatory interaction and identified drugs in Ovarian cancer and gastric cancer as well as identified and characterized disease causing fibroblasts in COVID-19 affected lungs, human ICC and liver metastases.
I received a BS from MIT and a PhD in Chemistry from UC Berkeley. As a member of the pharmaceutical industry for more than 10 years I am well versed in target selection and validation in cancer biology and many other disease areas. In addition, I have spent a considerable amount of time evaluating and employing a variety of technologies for identifying genomic biomarkers in numerous clinical and pre-clinical programs. At the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, I have worked extensively in cancer epigenetics and have contributed to the characterization of the androgen receptor cistrome in prostate cancer and have applied single cell approaches to study intratumor heterogeneity. At the Center for Functional Cancer Epigenetics, we apply state of the art epigenetics technologies to identify enhancers and other non-coding annotations in the human genome. Additionally, the Center has been developed and applied state of the art analysis pipelines to extract value from complex integrative genomics studies and support reproducible research efforts.
David Gallegos received his PhD in Neurobiology in the lab of Anne West at Duke University, where most of his work existed at the crossroads of neuronal activity-regulated transcription, epigenomic modification, and mechanisms of neuronal plasticity. He subsequently pursued an R-Authority postdoctoral position at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he applied multiple single-cell genomic and transcriptional profiling methods into more diverse organ systems and advanced in vitro organ/developmental models. Currently, David is a Scientist II at Takeda Pharmaceuticals on their Investigative Toxicology Team within the department of Drug Safety Research and Evaluation. In his role at Takeda, he supports all manner of cross-project single-cell/spatial Omics analysis, Advanced in vitro Neuronal models, cross-platform Neurotoxicity assessments
Parveen Kumar works as a Senior Computational Scientist at Boehringer Ingelheim, CT, USA. He graduated with a PhD in the field of Bioinformatics for single-cell technology from University of Leuven, Belgium. Later, he joined The Jackson Laboratory in 2017 as a Computational Scientist and Boehringer Ingelheim in 2023 as senior Computational Scientist. He focuses on developing multi-omics computational approaches to analyze high-dimensional single-cell/ bulk sequencing datasets and their applications to characterize the underlying heterogeneity and biological networks in health and disease. Abdelfattah N, Kumar P, Wang C, Leu JS, Flynn WF, Gao R, Baskin DS, Pichumani K, Ijare OB, Wood SL, Powell SZ, Haviland DL, Parker Kerrigan BC, Lang FF, Prabhu SS, Huntoon KM, Jiang W, Kim BYS, George J, Yun K. Single-cell analysis of human glioma and immune cells identifies S100A4 as an immunotherapy target. Nat Commun. 2022 Feb 9;13(1):767. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-28372-y. PubMed PMID: 35140215; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC8828877. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/1B3HNdp-5q25v/ bibliography/public/
Dr. Danny Bavli is a scientist with a focus on single-cell genomics, spatial transcriptomics, and multiplex imaging, primarily in the field of organ-on-chip and stem-cell-based therapies for type 1 diabetes. Currently serving as a research associate at Harvard University’s Stem Cell &Regenerative Biology department, he combines spatial transcriptomics, multiplex imaging and immune cell profiling to uncover potential druggable biomarkers and tissue specific TCR/ BCR sequences. Previously, as the director of organ-on-chip and single-cell genomics at SpacePharma– a Swiss-based company with R&D in Israel, he led the development of several organ-onchip models combined with genomics methodologies, which were sent to the international space station in collaboration with his industrial and academic partners. His expertise has been recognized through awards, patents, and a significant number of publications.
