EUTROC

Chiara Recchi graduated cum laude in Italy with a Master in the laboratory of Cesare Montecucco at the University of Padova. She then moved to France at the Pasteur Institute in the group of Brigitte Gicquel, where she obtained her PhD in Microbiology for her work on the virulence factors of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Later, she extended her interest to cell biology and she trained as a postdoc in the laboratory of Philippe Chavrier at the Curie Institute in Paris. Here she became involved in the study of intracellular trafficking and how this controls the metastatic properties of cancer cells.

She thus continued working in this field when in 2007 she moved to London, where she became research associate at the Imperial College in Miguel Seabra’s group. Here she developed her own project combining her expertise in intracellular trafficking with the lab’s experience in Rab proteins. This led to one of the first descriptions of Rab27a as key to tumour progression.

She now leads the Tumour Suppressor Group at the Ovarian Cancer Action Research Centre, directed by Hani Gabra, at Imperial College London.

Her main focus is to understand how the tumour suppressor protein OPCML controls trafficking and signalling of Receptor Tyrosine Kinases in ovarian cancer.

Dr Axel Walther is a medical oncologist and Director for Research in Oncology at University Hospitals Bristol. He is the co-lead for the Cancer Research Theme at the University of Bristol.

He completed his undergraduate degree at Cambridge University followed by Medical School at Oxford University. He trained at the Hammersmith, Middlesex and Royal Marsden Hospitals and obtained his PhD from University College London.

His research interests are genetic markers of cancer risk and outcome, and he has collaborated in the discovery of several low-penetrance colon cancer susceptibility loci, thought to make up part of the inherited risk of colon cancer. Dr Walther has presented these findings at global conferences, published in and reviewed articles for high-impact journals and contributed to textbooks on cancer.

Dr Christophe Le Tourneau is Head of the Phase I Program Institut Curie, Paris.

Euan gained a first class honours in Molecular Biology followed by a PhD in Medical Genetics from the University of Aberdeen.

In 2000 he joined Prof Hani Gabra and his team at the, then Imperial Cancer Research Fund now Cancer Research UK, unit in Edinburgh as a postdoctoral fellow.

From there he moved to Imperial College in 2003 where he ran the Molecular Therapy Lab within the Ovarian Cancer Action Research Centre. 

Since 2015 he is a Senior Investigator at GlaxoSmithKline.

Eaun is a Honorary Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London.

Dr Ioannis Pandis received a Ph.D. degree in Biological Chemistry from the BSRC “Al. Fleming” Institute in Athens, Greee in 2012.

From 2012, he has been working as a research associate at Imperial College. He is in the Discovery Science Group working on the European Innovatice Medicine Initiative (IMI), eTRIKs project, which is aimed at developing a translational information and knowledge management systems.

His personal interest is the development of bioinformatic applications enabling applied biomedical research, with a particular focus on genome regulation analysis.

Dr Jaume Reventós is the director of the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (Idibell) of the University of Barcelona.

He is the co-founder of Transbiomed and was previously head of the Research Unit in Biomedicine and Translational Oncology at the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR).

Reventós founded the VHIR spin-off Transbiomed in 2007 alongside Andreas Doll, Miguel Abal and Raimon Forés. In 2013, the company developed a test for early diagnosis of prostate cancer and began research into biomarkers for ovarian cancer.

Dr Cavallaro is a cell biologist and molecular oncologist interested in the biological mechanisms that underlie cancer development.

With his research group he discovered a novel interaction between the adhesion molecule NCAM and the receptor tyrosine kinase FGFR, introducing the paradigm that a growth factor receptor can be activated by a non-canonical ligand such as an adhesion molecule (Francavilla et al., J Cell Sci, 2007, and J Cell Biol, 2009).

His group also discovered that the NCAM/FGFR interaction plays a causal role in ovarian cancer, where it also emerged as a potential therapeutic target in preclinical models (Zecchini et al., EMBO Mol Med, 2011).

Another adhesion molecule that is intensively studied in his lab is L1, originally described as a neural adhesion molecule. They reported that L1 is expressed in specific lineages of the hematopoietic compartment, where it regulates immune cell motility and trafficking (Maddaluno et al., J Exp Med, 2009). Furthermore, his group reported that L1 plays a dual, cell context-dependent role in ovarian cancer (Zecchini et al, Cancer Res, 2008).

More recently, his research group became interested in the novel, unexpected role of adhesion molecules in tumor angiogenesis and vascular maturation. These observations led them to propose novel therapeutic target for anti-angiogenic treatments.

He is actively addressing these scientific issues in preclinical models and clinical samples of specific tumor types, such as pancreatic and ovarian carcinoma.

Another area of intense research in his group is the identification and characterisation of ovarian cancer stem cells, namely an elusive subset of transformed cells that is is thought to drive cancer development, dissemination, recurrence and chemoresistance.

Finally, they are actively pursuing the definition of novel ovarian cancer biomarkers and potential targets, combining cutting edge technologies with the use of clinically relevant specimens, taking advantage of a close collaboration with IEO gynecological oncologists

Professor Bowtell is the Head of the Cancer Genomics and Genetics Program at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and PI for the Australian Ovarian Cancer Study (AOCS).

Professor Bowtell is one of Australia’s leading ovarian cancer and human molecular genetics researchers.

He was Director of Research at Peter Mac for the last decade, returning to fulltime research in 2010 to lead the ovarian cancer arm of the National Health and Medical Research Council’s (NHMRC) $27 million involvement in the International Cancer Genomics Consortium, a world-wide effort aimed at mapping all the significant mutations in common cancers.

 Professor Bowtell heads the Australian Ovarian Cancer Study, a nationally collaborative project involving over 2000 women with ovarian cancer and one of the largest cohort studies of ovarian cancer in the world.

He is a molecular biologist and his lab focuses on the genomic analysis of ovarian cancer, with a focus on primary and acquired drug resistance. His lab is also funded from Cancer Australia and the US DoD to investigate high-risk BRCA mutations in women with ovarian cancer.

Professor Maria Paola Costi is a Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Modena in Italy.

In the past 15 years she has been teaching 10 different subject within Analytical Chemistry, Medicinal chemistry and Drug Design in the Faculty of Pharmacy. She also taught at the School of Doctorate in Health Science, teaching topics related to System biology approaches to drug discovery, Chemical space sorting and Medicinal chemistry in parasitology.

Professor Costi is responsible for the Laboratory of Drug Discovery of Enzyme Inhibitors of the Department of Pharmaceutical Science at University of Modena. The most of her work is focused on drug development of compounds directed to the folate pathways in different organisms, in particular in the area of anticancers and antinfectives. Another fundamental field of research is on beta-lactamase inhibitors discovery.

Recently she become involved in translational research in drug discovery in ovarian cancer. She is the co-Founder and scientific board member of the European network for translational research in ovarian cance (EUTROC).

She is also active in the technological transfer field: she is the co-Founder of the research-based biotech Tyodck Pharma, a university spin-off company and and is scientific responsible of EU projects in the area.

Professor Costi has published over 180 scientific works including papers on international journals, congress presentations, books chapters and patents. She is an external reviewer for different National and International Agencies and Scientific Journals, grant award peer reviewer.

Professor Robert Zeillinger is an Associate Professor at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Gynecology and Gynecological Oncology, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Vienna.

A graduate in biochemistry, Professor Zeillinger is also the founder and the head of the Molecular Oncology Group at The Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the Medical University of Vienna. The main objectives of the group's research are understanding gynaecological cancers at molecular levels, improving diagnosis and prognosis and defining novel therapeutic targets.

The interdisciplinary group is engaged in various national and international organizations and networks (e.g. TOC – Tumor Bank Ovarian Cancer; EUTROC – European Network for Translational Research in Ovarian Cancer; OCTIPS – Ovarian Cancer Therapy Innovative Models; OVCAD – Ovarian Cancer Diagnosis; Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft – Cluster Translational Oncology).