PROFESSOR PASI A. JÄNNE

Dr. Alan Sandler is a distinguished leader in oncology and drug development with extensive experience in both industry and academia. His expertise spans clinical development and operations, regulatory affairs, drug safety and development strategies. Dr. Sandler previously held the position of Executive Vice President, Chief Medical Officer at Mirati Therapeutics, a Bristol Myers Squibb company. Before joining Mirati, he was the President, Global Head of Development in Oncology at Zai Lab. Prior to that, Dr. Sandler held roles of progressive responsibility at Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, where he ultimately served as Senior Vice President and Global Head, Product Development of Oncology Solid Tumors. His academic positions include roles at Oregon Health and Science University, where he served as Professor of Medicine and Head of the Division of Hematology/Medical Oncology; Vanderbilt University as an Associate Professor of Medicine and Indiana University as Assistant Professor of Medicine. Dr. Sandler earned his M.D. from Rush Medical College and completed his training in internal medicine and a fellowship in medical oncology at Yale-New Haven Medical Center. An active contributor to the medical field, he has authored over 300 publications, including peer-reviewed articles, reviews, abstracts, and book chapters.

Professor Pasi A. Jänne, M.D., PhD, is a world renowned translational thoracic medical oncologist and one of the global leaders in the treatment of drug-resistant lung cancer. As one of the co-discoverers of EGFR mutations in lung cancer, he played a key role in elucidating resistance mechanisms to EGFR inhibitors and has made major contributions to better treatment solutions for patients. 

Professor Jänne is the Senior Vice President for Translational Medicine and the Director of the Belfer Center for Applied Cancer Science at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is an award-winning clinical researcher whose accolades include a Medal of Honor from the American Cancer Society in 2024, and the Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute in 2018.

Professor Jänne earned his M.D. and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and completed his fellowship training in medical oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Francesco Hofmann is VP, Head R&D Pierre Fabre Medical Care, since May 2021.

Prior to joining Pierre Fabre, Francesco spent 23 years in the Disease Area Oncology at Novartis. During this time, he had leadership roles of increasing responsibility, always focused on the discovery and development of novel cancer therapeutics. Since 2005, Francesco has been a member of the Oncology Leadership Team, that oversees drug discovery, translational research, data science and early clinical development at Novartis. Ultimately, from 2017, he was Global Head Oncology Drug Discovery with direct responsibility for the whole Oncology pre-clinical portfolio and for the Oncology Discovery organization in Basel, Switzerland, and in Cambridge, MA, USA. Teams under his leadership have discovered and progressed into clinical development more than a dozen novel cancer therapeutics.

From 1993 to 1997, Francesco was Research Fellow in Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA, where he performed experimental research to understand the underlying molecular mechanism driving the uncontrolled proliferation of cancer cells.

Prior to joining Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Francesco was at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland, where he earned a PhD in 1993 and a Master in 1989 in Biochemistry.

Professor Josep Tabernero holds MD and PhD degrees from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, and he is currently Head of the Medical Oncology Department at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital, Director of the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO) and Professor of Medicine at UVic-UCC. He has been Principal Investigator of several Phase I pharmacodynamic studies and translational projects with tumor-directed targeted therapies and immune-based therapies.

His research aims at potentiating molecular therapies targeting specific oncoproteins and accelerating more effective personalized cancer medicines for patients displaying genetic lesions or pathway dysregulation.

Dr. Tabernero serves on the Editorial Boards of various top-tier journals, including Annals of Oncology, ESMO Open, Cancer Discovery, Clinical Cancer Research, Cancer Treatment Reviews, and Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology. He has (co-)authored approximately 500 peer-reviewed papers with an H-Index of 95.

He was the President (2018 – 2019) of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO). He is also a member of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). He has also been a member of the Educational and Scientific Committees of ESMO, ASCO, AACR, AACR, AACR/NCI/EORTC, ASCO Gastrointestinal, TAT, and ESMO-GI/WCGIC meetings.

Professor Timothy Yap is a Medical Oncologist and Physician-Scientist based at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He is a Professor in the Department for Investigational Cancer Therapeutics (Phase I Program), and the Department of Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncology. Professor Yap is Vice President and Head of Clinical Development in the Therapeutics Discovery Division, a drug discovery biopharmaceutical division where drug discovery and clinical translation are seamlessly integrated. He is also the Associate Director of Translational Research in the Khalifa Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy, which is an integrated research and clinical trials program aimed at implementing personalized cancer therapy and improving patient outcomes. Professor Yap’s main research focuses on the first-in-human and combinatorial development of molecularly targeted agents and immunotherapies, and their acceleration through clinical studies using novel predictive and pharmacodynamic biomarkers.