CIRCULATING NUCLEIC ACIDS IN PLASMA & SERUM

Dr. Jinglan Zhang is a Qiushi Distinguished Professor at the Institute of Medical Genetics and Development, Zhejiang University. He is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) and an ABMGG-certified clinical molecular and biochemical geneticist. He previously served as Assistant Professor at Baylor College of Medicine and Director at the Baylor Genetics Laboratory.

Dr. Zhang has led the development of innovative genetic testing platforms for population-scale screening, including carrier screening, newborn metabolic screening, and chronic kidney disease precision diagnostics. Internationally recognized for pioneering non-invasive prenatal screening (NIPS) for single-gene disorders, his work has significantly advanced the understanding of human genetic conditions and their prenatal diagnosis. His research has been published in leading journals such as Nature Medicine, Genetics in Medicine, Molecular Cell, and Cell Discovery.

Professor Chen-Yu Zhang is a Professor of Biochemistry, Dean of the School of Life Sciences and Vice-Chancellor at Nanjing University. Prof. Zhang is the pioneer of extracellular microRNA research. In 2007, he has found firstly that the circulating microRNA serves as a novel class of non-invasive biomarker for diseases and can be used to diagnosis, prognosis, etc.

In 2010, he has also reported firstly that the secreted microRNA is the novel class of signaling molecule in mediating inter-cellular/inter-organ communication. In 2012, Professor Zhang has reported that functional exogenous plant microRNAs could be absorbed by human and animal. The absorbed exogenous plant microRNA regulated mammalian gene and human and animal’s physiology/pathophysiology in a cross-kingdom manner. The current studies will not only discover the roles of ex-RNAs in food/environment affecting human and animal’s physiology /pathophysiology, but also find the novel therapeutic strategies to treat diseases.

Professor Zhang has published 375 scientific papers. The total citation time is over 64,000 and HI=114. He has also got 53 international patents.

Professor Jo Vandesompele is full professor in Functional Cancer Genomics and Applied Bioinformatics at Ghent University, Belgium. He obtained a Master of Science in Bioscience Engineering (1997) and a PhD in Medical Genetics (2002). He is the author of more than 300 scientific articles in international peer-reviewed journals, including some pioneering publications in the domain of nucleic acid quantification. His H-index is 105, with 85 000 citations.

The lab’s research aims to exploit RNA for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. The various research lines converge on studying the role of coding and non-coding RNA in cancer and the utility of extracellular RNA in liquid biopsies.

Nucleic acid quantification method development (bulk, cell-free, spatial) provides the foundation to answer fundamental and translational research questions, through a combination of high-throughput (functional) genomics technologies and bioinformatics tools.

Prof. Vandesompele is also co-founder of 3 companies, with (former) roles as Chief Scientific Officer, including pxlence, InActiv Blue, and Biogazelle.

Professor Jeanne Tie is currently the Lower Gastrointestinal medical oncology clinical and research lead at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. She completed her medical training from the University of Otago, New Zealand, with several awards, including the University of Otago Award in Medicine. After completing her medical oncology training and higher research degree in 2012 focusing on biomarkers in colorectal cancer at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (Melbourne), Prof. Tie continued her career as a clinician researcher, focusing on the clinical applications of circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA). Her pioneering work described the promise of a fundamentally different approach to defining recurrence risk in stage II colorectal cancer using ctDNA as a marker of minimal residual disease. This pivotal finding led to several randomised trials, the DYNAMIC studies, to explore the utility of ctDNA informed adjuvant therapy approach in early-stage colorectal cancer, including the landmark DYNAMIC study in stage II colon cancer which represents the first prospective randomised controlled trial in solid tumour to demonstrate the benefit of a ctDNA-informed approach to guide patient management.

Prof. Tie’s research was recognised by awards such as the ASCO Cancer Foundation Young Investigator’s Award and the AACR Team Science Award. She has published over 140 papers and book chapters, many of which are in high impact journals such as NEJM, Lancet Oncology and Science. She serves as the chair on the Australasian Gastrointestinal Trials Group Lower GI working party, ESMO Colorectal Tumour Faculty, and the Cancer Adjudication Committee for the ASPREE International study.

Professor Alain R. Thierry initially worked on gene therapy solutions and on DNA auto-organization complex formation. He, then, contributed from early 2000s on the research and applications of circulating DNA (cirDNA) by conducting basic, technological and translational research especially in oncology. In particular, his work focused on the structure, origins and function of cirDNA. Prof. Thierry coordinated the first prospective blinded multicenter studies to offer (i) clinical validation of plasma analysis for detecting mutations in oncology, and (ii) demonstration of the clinical utility of using cirDNA analysis in digestive oncology. His research also focus on the other potentials of cirDNA, in cancer management care. His team has also been engaged for a long time in basic research programs on cirDNA structure and functions, and has pioneering works on cirDNA fragmentation, proposes potential solutions towards cancer screening with using fragmentomics, has shown the presence in blood of circulating functional cell-free mitochondria, and recently demonstrated cirDNA association with NETs production in cancer and COVID-19/long COVID diseases as well as with circulating microclots. He is now developing tools to screen for cancer, and to diagnose inflammatory diseases and viral infections.

Dr. Vladimir Teif’s PhD was devoted to biophysics of DNA-ligand binding and DNA condensation (2004), which included theory and experiments performed in Belarus and France. This was followed by a series of publications developing a computational framework for the analysis of combinatorial protein-DNA binding and predicting gene regulation and signal transduction from mechanistic molecular interactions (2005-2008). The latter works were carried out in the French Commission for Atomic Energy, University of California San Diego and the Hebrew University. Next, Dr. Teif became interested in nucleosome positioning in the context of cell differentiation and cancer, the topic developed during the work in the German Cancer Research Center (2009-2015).

Since 2015, Dr. Teif is leading a laboratory in the University of Essex, where he is currently also the head of the Genomics and Computational Biology Group. During the last decade, Dr. Teif has established an original research programme in nucleosomics analysis for liquid biopsies, focusing on several medical conditions, from healthy ageing to multiple cancer types to non-cancer diseases. The current work in Dr. Teif’s laboratory combines computational genomics, next generation sequencing experiments, biophysical modelling and artificial intelligence.
 

Dr. Qian Shi, PhD, is a Consultant in Quantitative Health Science and Professor of Biostatistics and Oncology at Mayo Clinic and Mayo College of Medicine in Rochester, MN. She leads statistical teams in Gastrointestinal (GI) Cancer and Gene/Viral Therapies at Mayo Clinic Cancer Center and Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology. Currently, she is Co-Director of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core for Mayo Clinic Liver SPORE.

Previously, Dr. Shi served as Director of the Biostatistics Shared Resource at Mayo Clinic Cancer Center and Director of Biostatistics for Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology. She has led seven large international database research projects and served as PI, Co-PI, or Co-Investigator on multiple NCI, industry, and foundation-funded grants.

Her research focuses on surrogate endpoint evaluations, Bayesian clinical trial design, biomarker-driven trials, and international data-sharing initiatives. She has collaborated extensively across oncology, surgery, radiology, pathology, and basic science. Dr. Shi has led independent statistical and data centers for global collaborations validating surrogate endpoints in solid tumors and hematologic diseases.

Dr. Shi has served as the primary statistician on over 35 Phase II/III oncology trials and has authored more than 200 publications, including in NEJM, JAMA, Lancet Oncology, and JCO. Nationally and internationally recognized, she serves on committees for AJCC, NCI, NIH, and Mayo Clinic, and as a sought-after journal referee and editorial board member for high-impact journals.

Dr. Kate Elizabeth Stanley is a researcher specializing in prenatal screening and reproductive genomics, with a focus on advancing the clinical applications of cell-free DNA (cfDNA). Her research explores the use of cfDNA not only for fetal genetic screening but also for maternal health assessment and obstetric complication detection.

At Columbia University Medical Center, Dr. Stanley contributed to gene discovery models in stillbirth, and during her PhD at KU Leuven, she developed cfDNA fragmentomic approaches to improve the clinical utility of non-invasive prenatal screening data in the Belgian population. Her work aims to expand the role of cfDNA in maternal-fetal medicine, enhancing early detection and risk assessment of pregnancy-related disorders.

Dr. Stanley holds an MSc from the Nuffield Department of Women's Reproductive Health, University of Oxford and was a Marie Curie PhD Fellow at the Center for Human Genetics at KU Leuven. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

Dr. Shervin Tabrizi is a physician-scientist and a radiation oncologist. He earned an AB in Chemical and Physical Biology from Harvard College, an MD from Harvard Medical School, and completed residency training in the Harvard Radiation Oncology Program in Boston. Dr. Tabrizi completed his postdoctoral research at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Gerstner Center for Cancer Diagnostics at the Broad Institute. His research combines approaches in genomics, protein engineering, and cancer biology to develop novel technologies in liquid biopsies. He has developed priming agents to increase the abundance of circulating tumor DNA in plasma. This work led to a start-up company focused on translating this technology to the clinic. Dr. Tabrizi is broadly interested in understanding the biology of circulating analytes such as cell-free DNA and developing approaches to leverage this biology to enhance cancer detection.

Dr. Amit Roshan is a surgical oncologist with a focus on translating liquid biopsies for clinical application. He did his doctoral work in cancer genomics and stem cell biology at the University of Cambridge and trained as a surgical oncologist with a clinical interest in minimal residual disease. He has experience in several healthcare systems including India, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Since 2019, Dr. Roshan has been focussing on developing applications of liquid biopsies in small amounts of clinical material such as Dried Blood Spots, and in translating applications for minimal residual disease after curative cancer treatment.

Dr. Roshan is the co-Director of Research for the Alliance for Cancer Early Detection, and the recipient of the Hunterian Professorship from the Royal College of Surgeons. He is currently funded by the Cancer Research UK, the Rosetrees Trust, and UK Research & Innovation.

Professor Nickolas Papadopoulos is a professor of oncology, pathology, and human genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is renowned for his contributions to cancer biology, genetics, and diagnostics, including co-discovering the genetic basis of hereditary nonpolyposis colon cancer (HNPCC), a common hereditary cancer. He was part of the team that first sequenced all protein-coding genes and identified genetic alterations in four major tumour types, advancing our understanding of tumorigenesis.

Prof. Papadopoulos has made groundbreaking discoveries, such as identifying novel mutations in chromatin remodelling genes in ovarian clear cell carcinomas and pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours. His work focuses on translating cancer genome research into clinical applications for early detection, diagnosis, and monitoring. He co-developed Cancer SEEK, a blood test for early cancer detection, and led the first interventional trial using a multi-cancer liquid biopsy test. He is also a co-founder of multiple companies developing cancer diagnostics.

Prof. Papadopoulos earned his B.S. from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, M.S. in biology from the University of Houston, and Ph.D. in biomedical sciences from the University of Texas Health Science Center. He completed a Fogerty Fellowship at the National Institute on Aging and a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins, joining the faculty in 2005.

The contributions of Prof. Papadopoulos have earned him numerous awards, including multiple AACR Team Science Awards, the Dr. George N. Papanicolaou Award, and the Director’s Teaching Award at Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Aaron Newman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University and a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. He is also a member of the Stanford Cancer Institute and the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. Dr. Newman has made significant contributions to computational biology with applications to liquid biopsy, cancer genomics, and tumor immunology. Key contributions include CAPP-Seq for ultrasensitive detection of circulating tumor DNA; CIBERSORT/x for decoding cellular composition from bulk genomic data; CytoTRACE/2 for inferring cellular differentiation states from scRNA-seq data; and EcoTyper for delineating context-dependent cellular ecosystems from bulk, single-cell, and spatial expression data.

Dr. Newman's research programme focuses on developing innovative data science tools to study the phenotypic diversity, differentiation hierarchies, and clinical significance of tumor cells and their surrounding microenvironments. Key results are further explored experimentally, both in the lab and through collaboration, with the goal of translating promising findings into the clinic.

Dr. Muhammed Murtaza is the Director of the Center for Precision Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery. Dr. Murtaza holds an MBBS from Aga Khan University Medical College in Pakistan, and earned a PhD in Medical Science from the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, University of Cambridge.

Dr. Murtaza’s research focuses on advancing cancer diagnostics through liquid biopsy technologies, specialising in the analysis of circulating tumor DNA. The overall goal of his research program is to transform cancer care by enhancing early detection and disease monitoring, with a particular emphasis on creating accessible diagnostic solutions for resource-limited settings. In recent work, the Murtaza lab has focused on analysis of DNA fragmentation patterns in plasma, urine and dried blood spots.

Funded by prestigious grants from the National Cancer Institute and research foundations, contributions from the Murtaza Lab have driven advances in genomics technologies for blood and tissue analysis for monitoring of treatment response and early detection of cancer. Dr. Murtaza has been recognised with multiple awards including the Bothwell Prize, the WARF Innovation Award and Vilas Mid-Career Faculty Award.

Through his commitment to research, clinical translation, and mentorship, Dr. Murtaza strives to make cancer diagnostics more accurate, more affordable, and available at a global scale.

Dr. Lauren Murphy is a researcher specialising in platelet biology and nucleic acid interactions, with a focus on their implications for liquid biopsy and cancer biology.

Before beginning her doctoral studies, Dr. Murphy worked in industry, gaining experience in translational research and diagnostics. She then completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Beth Psaila, where she discovered that human platelets harbour DNA fragments spanning the nuclear genome. This unexpected finding led to the validation of tumour-educated platelets as a liquid biopsy biomarker, enabling non-invasive molecular profiling of cancer. Her postdoctoral research builds on this discovery by investigating why platelets capture DNA and the broader biological significance of these interactions.

Dr. Murphy holds a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Birmingham and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Psaila Lab at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine and will soon join Prof. Richard White’s group at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research to explore novel roles of platelets in cancer.

Dr. Jiawei Lv is an accomplished physician-scientist specializing in Radiation Oncology at Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center (SYSUCC). She obtained her MD from Wuhan University and subsequently completed an MSc and PhD in Oncology at Sun Yat-sen University. Currently serving as an Attending Physician and Associate Researcher at SYSUCC, Dr. Lv leads research focused on nasopharyngeal carcinoma and cancer immunotherapy.

Dr. Lv has made contributions to advancing the understanding of treatment-remodeled tumor microenvironment and liquid biopsy biomarkers for assessing treatment responses in nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Her work has been featured in esteemed journals such as Nature Medicine, Cancer Cell, Nature Communications and Science Advances. Notably, she identified longitudinal cell-free EBV DNA as a crucial biomarker for heterogeneous treatment responses and dynamic recurrence risk monitoring.

Dr. Lv has been honoured with several prestigious awards, including the ASCO Merit Award in 2019 and recognition in China’s Top 10 Advances in Life Sciences in 2023 and 2024. Dr. Lv was also selected for the Postdoctoral Innovative Talent Support Program in 2021.

Professor Dennis Lo is the Vice-Chancellor and President of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Li Ka Shing Professor of Medicine of CUHK, the Scientific Co-Director at the Centre for Novostics, and the President of the Hong Kong Academy of Sciences. His research interests focus on the biology and diagnostic applications of cell-free nucleic acids in plasma. In particular, he discovered the presence of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma in 1997 and has since then been pioneering non-invasive prenatal diagnosis using this technology. This technology has been adopted globally and has created a paradigm in prenatal medicine. He has also made many innovations using cell-free nucleic acids for early cancer detection.

In recognition of his research, Prof. Lo has been elected as Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, Fellow of the Royal Society and Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. Prof. Lo has won numerous awards, including the 2014 King Faisal International Prize in Medicine, the 2016 Future Science Prize in Life Science, the 2019 Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award, the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the 2021 Royal Medal, the 2021 ESHG Mendel Award, the 2022 ISPD Pioneer Award, the 2022 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, the 2023 inaugural Tengchong Science Prize, the 2024 Jiménez Díaz Lecture Award and the 2025 Richard B. Johnston, Jr., MD Prize in Developmental Biology by March of Dimes.

Professor Dr. Arthur Liesz is a professor of experimental neurology at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich and a board-certified neurologist at the University Medical Center. He received his training in neurology at the University of Heidelberg Medical Center, in addition he was trained in experimental immunology at the German Cancer Research Institute (DKFZ). His research interest is on immunological aspects of acute brain injury, working on the topic of brain-immune interaction after acute brain injuries for nearly two decades.

Prof. Dr. Liesz’s research encompasses both sides of brain-immune interaction after stroke: the secondary neuroinflammatory reaction to brain damage and the impact of brain injury on the peripheral immune homeostasis. He is currently heading the Laboratory for Stroke-Immunology at the Institute for Stroke and Dementia, which spans across experimental studies using innovative preclinical research models as well as performing clinical studies including first-in-patient validation.

Prof. Dr. Liesz is principal investigator of the Excellence Cluster for Systems Neurology, recipient of several research awards including the prestigious Pette Award by the German Neurological Society, and is coordinator of the German Stroke-Immunology network.

Professor Dave Hoon is the Professor of Saint Johns’ Cancer Institute (SJCI), Providence Health System in Santa Monica, CA, USA. He is the Director of Translational Research of SJCI, also Dept Translational Molecular Medicine, and SJCI Sequencing Center. His prime interests over the last four decades have been in molecular diagnostic approaches of metastatic cancer in tissues and blood in early and late-stage cancer patients and in monitoring treatment responses to identify molecular prognostic factors.

Prof. Hoon has been working on cell-free nucleic acids (cfNA) since 1997. First studies were reported (1999) on clinical utility of plasma ctDNA LOH related to tumor clinical stage and progression in melanoma patients. Over the years he then reported on different forms of plasma ctDNA such as for mutations, methylation, and amplification of solid tumors patients of various clinical stages and in monitoring during immunotherapy treatment. Studies were also focused on early detection of metastatic cancer. His group also have reported cfDNA in form of small size fragments of DNA ALU repeats and non-coding genomic methylation status of genomic DNA LINE1 in plasma for cancer detection and monitoring cancer progression in patients. Recently, his group has developed NGS assays to monitor ctDNA as well as cfmiRNA as alternative approaches for detection and prognostic biomarkers in patients’ plasma and urine from various cancer types. Prof. Hoon recent focus has been involved in developing new approaches of NGS ctNA assays to improve monitoring of immune checkpoint immunotherapy in metastatic melanoma patients.

Professor Lisa Hui is a maternal fetal medicine specialist with research interests in cell-free fetal nucleic acids, amniotic fluid biology, prenatal screening and diagnosis.

Prof. Hui is a Professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Newborn Health at the University of Melbourne and Group Leader of the MCRI Reproductive Epidemiology group. She holds clinical appointments at the Mercy Hospital for Women and The Northern Hospital in Melbourne. She is a recent past director of the Board of the International Society for Prenatal Diagnosis and an associate editor of the scientific journal, Prenatal Diagnosis.

Professor Ellen Heitzer is an EU registered Clinical Laboratory Geneticist at the Institute of Human Genetics at the Medical University of Graz in AUSTRIA, where she is heading the Research Unit for “Liquid Biopsies for personalized medicine in cancer”. She is one of the leading scientists in Austria dealing with liquid biopsies and in 2022 she was appointed Professor for Liquid Biopsies.

Prof. Heitzer is particularly interested in circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) analyses and her group has developed and applied a set of techniques for the analysis of ctDNA to non-invasively investigate tumor evolution or use ctDNA as a response marker. Her expertise has been recognized internationally, which is reflected by the invitations to international congresses or reviews and book chapters in international journals. As a steering committee member of the European Liquid Biopsy Society (ELBS) she advocates for the standardization and guidelines of LB approaches to enable a widespread clinical use. As the co-head of the molecular genetics branch of the D&F Institute for Human Genetics, Prof. Heitzer is also involved in routine diagnostics of hereditary diseases with a special focus on familial tumor syndromes. Moreover, she is driving the continuous development and implementation of molecular genetic methods, in particular next generation sequencing.

Dr. Gavin Ha is an Associate Professor in the Herbold Computational Biology Program and the Division of Public Health Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. He earned his PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of British Columbia in 2014, where he built a strong foundation in computational cancer genomics. Following his doctoral studies, Dr. Ha completed postdoctoral training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute, where he developed ichorCNA, a tool to estimate circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) fraction.

In 2018, Dr. Ha established his research group at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. His lab is dedicated to developing and applying innovative approaches in computational genomics and liquid biopsy cancer research. Dr. Ha's team has developed new tools for ctDNA sequencing analysis, including Griffin for inferring nucleosome accessibility and Keraon for predicting tumor phenotypes.

Dr. Ha's research aims to uncover genetic and epigenetic alterations associated with treatment resistance, identify blood-based genomic biomarkers, and translate these findings into clinical applications to advance cancer precision medicine. His research is supported by the V Foundation, Prostate Cancer Foundation, US Department of Defense, and the National Institutes of Health, including the prestigious NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.

Professor Lars Dyrskjøt is a Professor of Molecular Medicine at Aarhus University in Denmark. He leads a research group at the Department of Molecular Medicine at Aarhus University Hospital, where his team focuses on translational bladder cancer research. Prof. Dyrskjøt’s research is primarily centered on translational bladder cancer, with a particular emphasis on biomarker models for predicting treatment outcomes in both early and late-stage bladder cancer. His work also includes liquid biopsy analysis for monitoring early relapse and therapy response, as well as understanding disease biology, tumor subtypes, and tumor evolution.

In addition to his research, Prof. Dyrskjøt is an active member of several scientific committees and advisory boards, including the Scientific Congress Office of the European Association of Urology (EAU) and the International Bladder Cancer Network (IBCN).

Professor Yuval Dor is a developmental biologist interested in tissue dynamics, mostly in the context of the pancreas and associated diseases - diabetes and pancreatic cancer. He has focused on epigenetic liquid biopsies, based on DNA methylation patterns. Using a comprehensive atlas of human cell type methylome, his work identifies the tissue origins of cfDNA fragments which often reflect cell death and pathology. His group applies epigenetic liquid biopsies to a wide variety of conditions including cancer, inflammatory conditions, and neurodegeneration and psychiatric diseases, drug toxicity and cardiology, as well as physical exercise. He also studies the basic biology of cfDNA generation and clearance, and the utility of additional body fluids such as oral swabs, stool and urine.

Dr. Maximilian Diehn is a co-founder of Foresight Diagnostics and Professor of Radiation Oncology, Vice Chair of Research, and Division Chief of Radiation and Cancer Biology at Stanford University.

Dr. Diehn is a physician scientist and radiation oncologist who specializes in the treatment of lung cancer. His research programme spans laboratory, translational, and clinical studies. The focus of his research efforts is on the development and application of liquid biopsy technologies for cancer screening, treatment response assessment, and detection of minimal residual disease.

Dr. Diehn has served on numerous committees for national and international organizations including NCI, ASCO, AACR, ESMO, and IASLC. He is a Scientific Editor for Cancer Discovery and serves on the Thoracic Malignancies Steering Committee of the NCI. He has been recognized with a variety of awards, including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the V Foundation Scholar Award, the Sidney Kimmel Scholar Award, the Doris Duke Clinical Scientist Development Award, and election into the American Society for Clinical Investigation. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine for his research contributions in the field of liquid biopsies in 2021.

Dr. Luis Diaz is an internationally renowned physician-scientist whose pioneering work has transformed the landscape of cancer diagnostics and treatment. He currently serves as Head of the Division of Solid Tumor Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he holds the Grayer Family Chair in Medicine and is Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Diaz’s groundbreaking research established circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) as a powerful biomarker for cancer screening, monitoring, and early detection. His team also uncovered the therapeutic link between immunotherapy and cancer genetics in mismatch repair–deficient tumors, leading to the first pan-tumor FDA approval for immunotherapy and a landmark study achieving a 100% complete response rate.

He previously served on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University and trained under Dr. Bert Vogelstein. Dr. Diaz co-founded Personal Genome Diagnostics and has held leadership roles including Editor-in-Chief of Cancer Discovery and Chair of the SU2C Colon Cancer Dream Team. In 2021, he was appointed to the U.S. National Cancer Advisory Board. Dr. Diaz is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the AACR Academy, and several other professional societies. His work continues to inform clinical practice and translational research across oncology.

Dr. Iwijn De Vlaminck is an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell University. Dr. De Vlaminck trained in applied and biophysics before moving into genomics for a postdoc with Stephen Quake at Stanford. His research has led to the development of blood tests to diagnose organ transplant rejection, already widely used, a blood test to screen for infection from blood, used in more than 400 US hospitals, RNA liquid biopsy to monitor inflammation, and methods to spatially map RNA and microbes in tissues. He is a recipient of several awards, including the NIH New Innovator Award, the Noyce Foundation Assistant Professorship in the Life Sciences, a Rainin Foundation Synergy Award, and research excellence and teaching excellence awards from Cornell University. He is a co-founder of Kanvas biosciences.

Professor Charles Chiu, M.D./Ph.D. is Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases at University of California, San Francisco and Co-Director of the UCSF Clinical Microbiology Laboratory. Prof. Chiu currently leads a translational research laboratory focused on the development and clinical validation of metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) and host response profiling assays for diagnosis of infections, outbreak investigation, and pathogen discovery. He is a principal developer of clinical mNGS assays for pathogen detection from cerebrospinal fluid, plasma, and respiratory fluids that have achieved breakthrough device designation from the FDA.

Prof. Chiu also leverages machine learning based approaches to develop host response classification models based on RNA gene expression for differential diagnosis of acute infectious syndromes (meningitis / encephalitis and sepsis) and infection-associated chronic illnesses (Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, and long COVID). His work is supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), US Department of Defense (DoD), Abbott Laboratories, Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub, and the Bay Area Lyme Disease Foundation. Prof. Chiu has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, holds over 15 patents and patent applications, is a co-founder of Delve Bio, and serves on the scientific advisory board of Delve Bio, Biomeme, Mammoth Biosciences, Flightpath Biosciences, Biomesense, and Poppy Health.

Professor Allen Chan is the Associate Vice-President (Knowledge Transfer) and the Chairman of Chemical Pathology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), the Scientific Co-Director of the Centre for Novostics. He is a co-inventor of the non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT) for Down syndrome, an innovation that has transformed prenatal care worldwide, with millions of tests performed annually.

Prof. Chan has developed a number of NGS-based approaches for cancer detection. He led the first large-scale prospective study demonstrating the use of plasma DNA analysis (“liquid biopsy”) for early cancer screening. Using nasopharyngeal cancer as a model, his team showed that plasma DNA analysis is able to detect early asymptomatic cancers and improve survival. This study was featured as one of the top ten notable articles in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2017.

Prof. Chan is a co-inventor of over 150 patent families. In 2020, he was named one of the “Top Twenty Translational Researchers” by Nature Biotechnology.

Dr. Yunlong Richard Cao is an Assistant Professor at the Biomedical Pioneering Innovation Center (BIOPIC) of Peking University. Trained as a biophysicist, Dr. Cao pioneered a single-cell non-bisulfite methylation sequencing technique named Cabernet, which enables high-throughput DNA methylation profiling to decode cellular heterogeneity in cancer, brain, and aging. Currently, Dr. Cao leads China-focused efforts in liquid biopsy-based cancer early detection, integrating cfDNA methylation and fragmentomics to develop non-invasive, cost-effective, and highly sensitive multicancer early detection solutions (e.g., for gastric, colon, liver, and lung cancers).

As an immunologist, Dr. Cao has also made key contributions to understanding SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies, humoral immunity following SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and infection, and antibody-mediated immune escape by SARS-CoV-2 variants. His achievements have been recognized through multiple honors, including Nature’s "Ten people who helped shape science in 2022" (Nature’s 10), MIT Technology Review’s "35 Innovators Under 35" (China) in 2021, and the Xplorer Prize in 2024.

Dr. Julia Burnier is an Associate Professor in the Gerald Bronfman Department of Oncology and Department of Pathology at McGill University (Montréal, Canada) and a Scientist at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC). She is Director of the Liquid Biopsy laboratory within the Cancer Research Program (CRP) of the RI-MUHC and studies the role of tumor-derived (circulating) molecules in cancer. Using liquid biopsy, she investigates circulating nucleic acids (i.e. ctDNA and CTCs) and tumour-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs) in mediating tumour progression and treatment resistance.

Dr. Burnier's research programme is divided in two main themes: 1) design clinically feasible approaches to detect cancer development and monitor treatment response/resistance through changes in ctDNA (biomarker discovery); 2) investigate how circulating biomarkers contribute to tumour progression and can be used as nanomedicine delivery vehicles (therapeutics). Dr. Burnier is a Fonds de Recherche en Santé Research Scholar, recipient of the Canadian Cancer Society Emerging Scholar Award (2021-2026), and a William Dawson Award recipient (2023-2028).

Dr. Diana W. Bianchi is the Director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which is one of the 27 institutes and centers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). She leads a 1.75B USD budget that focuses on research and training in maternal and child health and people with disabilities. She received her M.D. from Stanford University and her postgraduate training in Pediatrics, Medical Genetics and Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on noninvasive prenatal DNA screening and diagnosis and developing prenatal therapies for genetic disorders. She is a Past President of the International Society for Prenatal Diagnosis (ISPD) and a former Editor-in-Chief of the society’s official journal, Prenatal Diagnosis.

Dr. Bianchi has received multiple awards, including election to the US National Academy of Medicine in 2013, the 2015 Neonatal Landmark Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the 2016 Maureen Andrew Award for Mentorship, the 2017 lifetime achievement award in Medical Genetics from the March of Dimes, and the ISPD’s 2019 Pioneer Award. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam and the Health Public Service Visionary Award from the Society for Women’s Health Research in 2020. In 2022 she was a finalist for the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals and was named as one of Forbes.com “Fifty (women) Over 50” in the category “Impact”.

Professor Claus Lindbjerg Andersen is a leading cancer researcher at Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark, where he directs the Danish National Center for Circulating Tumor DNA (ctDNA) Guided Cancer Treatment. His pioneering work focuses on the use of ctDNA as a biomarker for early cancer detection, prognosis, and monitoring, particularly in colorectal cancer. His research enables the identification of minimal residual disease and the detection of cancer recurrence after surgery, significantly improving personalized treatment strategies.

Prof. Andersen has been instrumental in large-scale clinical trials such as the IMPROVE, DANISH-MRD and CIRCPAC studies, which explore ctDNA-guided cancer care. His work, published in high-impact journals, has made significant contributions to understanding the biology of tumor DNA and its clinical applications, helping transform cancer diagnostics and post-operative surveillance​.

Dr. Sean Agbor-Enoh, MD, PhD is a physician scientist and Lab Chief of NHLBI Laboratory of Applied Precision Omics (APO). He is also a Lasker Clinical Research Tenure Track Investigator and an NIH Distinguish Scholar with a joint appointment as an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. His research mission is to develop better diagnostics and therapies of transplant rejection: a complication that contribute to the vexingly low median survival of only 6.5 years after lung transplantation.

Dr. Agbor-Enoh directs the Genomic Research Alliance for Transplantation (GRAfT). His lab has proposed cfDNA approaches to detect transplant rejection earlier than current standards. Dr. Agbor-Enoh led the first-in-human trial to test the utility cfDNA in lung transplant patients. He has also tested the utility of cfDNA in other transplant and non-transplant diseases.

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