Presenter

Paolo Giovanni Casali, Associate Professor of Medical Oncology at the University of Milan, is the Director of the Medical Oncology Unit 2 (focusing on adult sarcomas and rare cancer networking) at the Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale Tumori, Milan, Italy, where he also serves as the Secretary of the Ethics Committee. As the Chair of the European Public Policy Committee, he is a member of the Council of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), wherein he previously served as the Treasurer and the Director of Public Policy.

His clinical and research activities focus on sarcomas, mainly adult soft tissue sarcomas and gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST). He is the Secretary of the Italian Sarcoma Group and a member of the Soft Tissue & Bone Sarcoma Group of the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC). He is a member of the ESMO Sarcoma Faculty.

In the area of rare cancers, he coordinated the Joint Action on Rare Cancers (JARC), and chairs the Sarcoma domain of EURACAN, the European Reference Network on rare adult solid cancers. He coordinates the Steering committee of Rare Cancers Europe, an ESMO-launched multistakeholder initiative to address the many issues posed by rare cancers.

Anna M. Czarnecka, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Department of Soft Tissue/Bone Sarcoma and Melanoma, Maria-Sklodowska-Curie National Research Institute of Oncology, Warsaw, Poland. 2005 – 2009 Doctoral studies, Postgraduate School of Molecular Medicine, Medical University of Warsaw. 2009 – 2017 Manager, Laboratory of Molecular Oncology, Military Institute of Medicine, Warsaw. 2010 – 2016 clinical oncology specialist training in the Military Institute of Medicine, Warsaw. 2017 – 2020 researcher at the Laboratory of Molecular Oncology and Innovative Therapies, Military Institute of Medicine, Warsaw. 2018 – researcher, Department of Experimental Pharmacology, Mossakowski Medical Research Centre Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. 2020 – 2021 deputy director for scientific affairs, Maria Sklodowska-Curie National Research Institute of Oncology, Warsaw.

Anna Maria Frezza is a six-years experienced medical oncologist, whose career has been fully dedicated to clinical assistance and research in the field of soft tissue and bone sarcomas. Born in 1984, she received her medical degree in 2009 in Rome, where she completed her training in 2015. In 2011 and 2012 she worked as clinical and research fellow in the sarcoma unit at the “University College of London Hospital – London Sarcoma Service” and at the “Royal Marsden Hospital”. Since 2016, she is employed in the Adult Mesenchymal and Rare Tumor Medical Treatment Unit at Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale Tumori, in Milano, where she currently works. Over the last 5 years, her clinical and research activity has been focused on ultra-rare sarcomas, among which epithelioid sarcoma. She has been involved in several international clinical trials as sub-investigators, and she has been coordinating national and international collaborative efforts on epithelioid sarcoma, leading to relevant scientific publications on this topic (JAMA Oncol. 2018, Eur J Surg Oncol. 2020). She is part of the sarcoma faculty in the European Society of Medical Oncology and the Public Policy Division. She is involved in the coordination team of the sarcoma domain of EURACAN, the European Reference Network for Rare Adult Solid Cancer. She has been awarded in 2019 by Istituto Nazionale Tumori with Premio Giovani Ricercatori 2018”, in 2017 by the European Society of Medical Oncology as winner of the fellowship “Leaders Generation Programme” and in 2015 by Fondazione Umberto Veronesi as winner of “Annual Research Grant”.

Professor Dr. Dr. Grünewald is head of the Translational Pediatric Sarcoma Research Division at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) Heidelberg, Hopp-Kindertumorzentrum (KiTZ) Heidelberg, and resident physician at the Pathlogical Institute of Heidelberg University Hospital, Germany. He studied medicine and philosophy in Würzburg (Germany), Niigata (Japan), Philadelphia (USA), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Sheffield and Newcastle upon Tyne (UK). MD 2008, University of Würzburg, PhD 2012, Technical University of Munich. Habilitation 2018, LMU Munich. 2014-2020 principal investigator of the Max Eder Research Group for Pediatric Sarcoma at LMU Munich. 2015 International research award of the German Sarcoma Conference. 2020 Rudolf Virchow Award of the German Society of Pathology. Research interests include: Identification and characterization of novel tumor-specific targets for personalized therapy.

Cigall Kadoch, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Pediatric Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Affiliate Faculty of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard Medical School, and Institute Member and Epigenomics Program Co-Director at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

She established her independent laboratory in 2014, at age 28, one of the youngest scientists ever appointed to the Harvard Medical School faculty, immediately following completion of her Ph.D. studies in Cancer Biology at Stanford University working with developmental biologist Gerald Crabtree. She has quickly become a leading expert in chromatin and gene regulation and is internationally recognized for her groundbreaking studies in these areas. Specifically, her laboratory studies the structure and function of chromatin remodeling complexes such as the mammalian SWI/SNF (or BAF) complex, with emphasis on defining the mechanisms underlying cancer-specific perturbations.

Javier Martin-Broto MD, PhD, is a Medical Oncologist from 1994, devoted to sarcoma care since 1995 and exclusively focused on sarcoma since 2000. He is Founder Member of The Spanish Group for Research on Sarcomas (GEIS) in 1994 and currently vice-chairman of this group from 2019 (He was GEIS Chairman from 2010 to 2018). From September 2014 to March 2021, Javier Martin-Broto moved to Hospital Virgen del Rocio in Seville to coordinate the MDT sarcoma team and to lead the sarcoma lab TERABIS. He is currently relocating to Madrid, in University Hospital Fundación Jiménez Diaz, where he will lead the sarcoma care and research, combining clinical care, preclinical and translational research and teaching task in the University in this new High-Tech Hospital.

He is leading the consortium SELNET through Horizon 2020 grant, this network of expert sarcoma centers, involves Latin-American and European countries.

Dr. Antonio Pérez‐Martínez (1974), is the Head of the Paediatric Haemato‐Oncology Service at the University Hospital La Paz, Madrid (2018), Professor of the Department of Paediatrics at the Faculty of Medicine of the University Autonoma of Madrid (UAM) (2017). Director of the Department of Paediatrics at the Faculty of Medicine of the UAM (2019) and Principal Investigator of the Translational Research Group in Childhood Cancer, Haematopoietic Transplantation and Cell Therapy of the Health Research Institute of La Paz Hospital (IdiPAZ) (2013). He is responsible for the Clinical Research Unit in paediatric haemato‐oncology ccredited by the consortium European Innovative Therapies for Children with Cancer (ITCC, 2016). He is Chair of the subcommittee COST4KIDS at the Paediatric Disease Working Party (PDWP) of the European Bone Marrow Transplantation (EBMT 2018‐2022).

From 2019 Prof. Sgambato has been appointed Scientific Director of the Cancer Research Center “Centro di Riferimento Oncologico della Basilicata IRCCS-CROB, Rionero in Vulture (Potenza), Italy. He is on academic leave from his position of Full Professor of General Pathology at the Catholic University School of Medicine, Rome (from 2015). He had previously worked as Associate Professor (from 2010) and Assistant Professor (Ricercatore) at the same Institution from 2000. Prof. Sgambato has pursued a constant and intense research activity in cancer research which includes both basic and translational researches. After obtaining a degree in Medicine (cum laude) from the University of Naples “Federico II” with a thesis in Oncology, Dr. Sgambato has obtained a Specialization in Oncology (cum laude) and a Ph.D. in Oncology at the Catholic University School of Medicine, Rome.

Annalisa Trama is an MD, PhD with long last experience in cancer descriptive epidemiology based on population-based/real world data. She was among the founders of RARECARE (surveillance of rare cancers in Europe) which proposed a definition for rare cancer (incidence < 6/100,000) currently used in Europe, the USA, south America and East Asia. She founded RARECAREnet Asia, a collaboration with Asian population-based cancer registries (CRs) that showed that most cancers rare in Europe are rare also in Asia. She coordinated the project RARECAREnet (information network on rare cancers). Using data from 94 CRs, survival for rare cancers was reported to be lower than for common cancers and large survival gaps were described across European countries. Geographical variations included curable cancers, suggesting that clinical expertise may be substantially relevant to the outcome.