Directory

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 Smith is a Medical Director for Europe having joined Theradex® in February 2010.

He has background training in Medical Oncology with 15 years’ clinical practice experience. He is a graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and completed his postgraduate training in St Bartholomew and the Royal Marsden hospital. 

Dr Smith joined the industry with PPD as Lead Medical Director for Oncology (ex-US). His responsibilities at Theradex® include evaluation of the clinical, commercial feasibility and project strategy with clients; protocol development; and selecting and liaising with clinical investigators during the clinical trial progress. He is also responsible for assessing AE and SAEs for selected European studies, commenting and preparing narrative reports for onward reporting to clients, regulatory agencies, investigators and ethics committees as necessary.

Dr Smith is also responsible for medical review of data emerging from clients’ clinical trials and for advising clients on appropriate action to be taken based on the emerging data and to advise on risk management especially risk mitigation.

Dr Smith also has experience in early access patient schemes and advising on integrating market access programs in the product lifecycle development.

Dr Smith is a member of both American Society of Clinical Oncologists and European Society of Medical Oncology.

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.