Welcome to our 2024 International Summer School

For full details of the programme please download here:  SummerSchoolProgramme_BigData

Bissan Al-Lazikani is Professor of Genomic Medicine, Director of Discovery Data Science and founding faculty of the Data Science Institute at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Prior to this, she was Head of Data Science at the Institute of Cancer Research, London. She is formally trained in biology and computer science: BSc Molecular Biology from University College, London; MSc Computer Science from Imperial College, London; PhD Computational Biology from the University of Cambridge, and Howard Hughes postdoctoral fellowship Biophysics, Columbia University, NY. She co-led the creation of the groundbreaking ChEMBL database and then led the creation of the world’s largest public drug discovery knowledgebase, canSAR, integrating vast multidisciplinary data; and leading suite of AI-driven drug discovery analysis algorithms. She applies these to discovery novel drugs and optimize therapy for adult and pediatric cancers.

Krishna Bulusu is a Director in Oncology Early Data Science at AstraZeneca and leads the Oncology Knowledge Graphs team, bringing together world’s knowledge with internal data to generate novel hypotheses with the fundamental aim of delivering patient benefit. His team’s focus is to accelerate the adoption and value delivered through AI across the drug discovery and development pipeline – from target discovery, patient stratification, to safety risk factors. A key part of his team is also to establish collaborations with leading academic groups, start-ups and industrial partners accelerating democratisation of AI-led discoveries. He previously held a Postdoctoral Research Associate position at the Centre for Molecular Informatics in Cambridge on drug combination predictive modelling in Oncology and rare diseases. Krishna received his PhD from the Institute of Cancer Research in Computational Biology & Chemogenomics, and holds a Master’s degree in Bioinformatics from the University of Edinburgh.

Mariella Filbin earned her MD and PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from the Medical University of Graz, Austria. After a pediatric residency at Boston Children’s Hospital, she completed a fellowship in pediatric hematology/oncology at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. She joined the faculty at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s as a pediatric neuro-oncologist in July 2017. In addition to her role in the treatment of patients with brain tumors, her research focuses on establishing cellular networks of tumor dependencies in pediatric brain tumors with the goal of finding new targeted therapies. Current areas of emphasis are: (1) utilizing single-cell transcriptomics to determine the tumor architecture and heterogeneity in pediatric brain tumors and (2) exploring the downstream effects of epigenetic driver mutations and their potential therapeutic applications in DIPG and high-grade gliomas.

Richard J Gilbertson FRS, trained as a paediatric oncologist in the UK before moving in 2000 to St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, USA where he served as Scientific and Comprehensive Cancer Centre Director, Executive Vice President and Lillian R Cannon Endowed Chair. In August 2015, he moved back to England where he is Li Ka Shing Chair of Oncology and Head of Department of Oncology at the University of Cambridge, Director of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre, Senior Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and co-director of the CRUK CBTCE. His laboratory research is focused on understanding the link between normal development and the origins of cancer, particularly brain tumours.

Dr Alex Bruna is a Team Leader in the Institute of Cancer Research.  She obtained her PhD from the University of Barcelona, followed by two postdoctoral fellowships at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City and Vall d’Hebron Institute, Barcelona. As a Senior Postdoc Alex developed, coordinated and co-led a translational research framework for patient-derived tumour xenografts and short-term cultures of PDX cells at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute. She started her lab, the Preclinical Modelling of Paediatric Cancer Evolution team in 2020 at the Centre for Paediatric Oncology Experimental Medicine and at the Centre for Cancer Evolution at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. Currently, her group focuses on cancer   evolutionary studies using improved preclinical mouse and human-derived cancer models of solid paediatric cancers that faithfully recapitulate the biology and major clinical features of the children’s disease.

Kevin Brindle is Emeritus Professor of Biomedical Magnetic Resonance in the Department of  Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge and a Senior Group Leader in the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute.  He got his BA (Biochemistry,1978) and D. Phil (1982) in Oxford, before becoming a Royal Society University Research Fellow in 1986.  He moved to a lectureship in Manchester in 1990 and in 1993 to a lectureship in Cambridge, where he became Professor in 2005. The focus of his work is to develop novel imaging methods to detect cancer, disease progression and to monitor early tumour responses to treatment.

Madeline Lancaster is a Group Leader in the Cell Biology Division of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), part of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in Cambridge, UK. Madeline joined the LMB in 2015, after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA) in Vienna, where she developed brain organoids. Research in the Lancaster lab focuses on human brain development using stem cells to generate brain organoids that allow modelling of human brain development in vitro. The laboratory studies the most fundamental differences between human brain development and that of other mammalian species. The lab also studies cellular mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and intellectual disability.

Raj Jena is a group leader in machine learning & radiomics in the Department of Oncology at the University of Cambridge and an honorary consultant in neuro-oncology at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. He is responsible for a multi-disciplinary group who work to develop novel computational models in Oncology and is Principal Investigator of Hamlet.rt, the first prospective machine learning study in radiation therapy for patients with brain tumours and cancers of the lung, prostate and Head & Neck regions. He has developed computational models for NHS England, the Royal College of Radiologists, and commercial partners including Elekta and Accuray, as well as OSAIRIS, the first open source AI medical device to be developed within the NHS. As director of the NIHR Oncology Research Collaboration, Raj facilitates collaboration between and beyond the NIHR Biomedical Research Centres (BRCs).

Professor Paul Workman is Harrap Professor of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the Institute of Cancer Research, London (ICR) and co-director of the CRUK CBTCE. He is renowned for his research on the discovery and mechanistic investigation of cancer drugs and chemical probes – including inhibitors of protein kinases, PI3 kinases, molecular chaperones including HSP90 and HSP70, and the Heat Shock Factor 1 pathway. Paul previously served as Chief Executive of the ICR, Deputy Chief Executive of ICR  and as Director of the ICR’s CRUK Cancer Therapeutics Unit, where he led the discovery of twenty drug candidates, twelve of which have progressed to clinical trials; Paul was also Founding Director of the CRUK Convergence Science Centre at ICR and Imperial College and its predecessor. Earlier he held leadership positions at the CRUK Beatson Laboratories, University of Glasgow; the MRC Clinical Oncology Unit, Cambridge University; and Zeneca Pharmaceuticals (now AstraZeneca). He also serves as Executive Director of the non-profit Chemical Probes Portal, a resource to inform the selection and use of high-quality small-molecule tools for biomedical research.

Gary Newton joined the ICR in January 2020 as leader of Medicinal Chemistry Group 3 and has been a CRUK CBTCE group leader since 2022. His group is involved in collaborative research with internal and external partners with the aim of discovering new cancer therapeutics. Dr Newton studied chemistry at the University of Sheffield before completing his PhD on the asymmetric synthesis of tropane alkaloids. Following his PhD, he joined OSI Pharmaceuticals in their oncology division, where he worked on a number targets including integrins and kinases, helping to generate molecules suitable for proof of concept and progression to the clinic. In 2004, Dr Newton joined NCE Discovery, later Domainex, where he spent the next fifteen years helping to build up the medicinal chemistry group as well as leading multi-disciplinary groups across a number of therapeutic areas.

Karin Straathof graduated with both a medical degree and BSc from Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her PhD at Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, USA) was on adoptive T cell immunotherapy for Epstein-Barr virus associated malignancies. She trained in paediatrics and subsequent subspecialty paediatric oncology in London and now is an honorary consultant paediatric oncologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital. With award of her Wellcome Trust Clinician Scientist Fellowship she has established her own research group at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and the UCL Cancer Institute. Her research interest is T cell-based immunotherapy for childhood solid tumours. Her work led to one of the first phase I clinical studies of CAR-T cell therapy for children with relapsed or refractory neuroblastoma. Her research group now develops cellular therapies incorporating advanced engineering approaches to achieve sustained activity against childhood solid tumours with further clinical studies.

Pau Creixell studied Human Biology at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, before moving to Oxford, London and the Technical University of Denmark where he obtained his PhD in Computational Biology. He then received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation to pursue his studies at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. After securing a Pathway to Independence award from NIH/NCI, he established his lab at the University of Cambridge – CRUK Cambridge Institute in 2020 as a junior group leader in the CRUK CBTCE. The Creixell lab integrates machine learning and high-throughput biochemistry to study how proteins selectively recognize their substrates, how this process is perturbed in cancer and how it can be hijacked to find highly selective and mutant-specific drugs to overcome drug resistance.

Session Seven is our Careers Session! We are pleased to welcome some of our distinguished speakers to talk about their careers and experiences

Academia vs Industry: Petra Hamerlik

My journey to becoming a PI – AMA: Pau Creixell

The green grass of academia and the manure that fertilizes it: Lucy Stead

Grant Writing: Richard Gilbertson

Michael D. Taylor, MD, PhD, is a pediatric neurosurgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) and a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics – Hematology/Oncology and Neurosurgery, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. He is also the Director of the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Research Program at TCH and a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research. His research centres on the molecular genetics of medulloblastoma and ependymoma. Michael attended The University of Western Ontario and earned his medical degree in 1994. His education and training continued at the University of Toronto, where he earned his PhD in Molecular Genetics in 2002, and his residency training in Neurosurgery in 2003. Dr. Taylor then won a Detweiler Traveling Fellowship from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada for fellowship training in paediatric neurosurgery and paediatric neuro-oncology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, where he completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Cancer Genomics in the Department of Developmental Neurobiology.