Skip to Content
NIH - National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis Center for Cancer Research
NCI Experimental Therapeutics Program (NExT)
Contact NExT
Show menu
Search this site
Last Updated: 10/29/18

Presenter Bios for NCI Symposium

Gideon Bollag

Gideon Bollag, PhD currently serves as Chief Executive Officer of Plexxikon, a member of the Daiichi Sankyo group based in Berkeley, California. In this role, Dr. Bollag's responsibilities include coordination of drug discovery and development efforts, and management of internal and external resources necessary to build a pipeline of compounds for cancer and other diseases. Among other achievements, the Plexxikon team discovered the RAF inhibitor Zelboraf, an FDA-approved product that has significantly impacted not only the treatment of metastatic melanoma but also the understanding of basic RAF biology. More recently, the CSF1R inhibitor pexidartinib has completed a phase 3 study, achieving Breakthrough Therapy Designation from the FDA. He started his oncology career at Cetus Corporation in 1989, and then joined as one of the initial scientists at Onyx Pharmaceuticals, where he eventually became senior director of small molecule therapeutics. He led Onyx teams in collaborations to discover Nexavar and Ibrance, both now approved cancer treatments. Since 2002, Gideon has been with Plexxikon where he has led the discovery and development of a growing pipeline of experimental cancer therapies. He has held management positions of increasing responsibility at Plexxikon, culminating in his current role as CEO. He earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Berkeley and his BS in chemistry from Penn State.

Pamela Munster

Dr. Munster received her medical degree from the University of Bern, Switzerland; completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Indiana University Medical Center then moved to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York for her oncology and hematology fellowship. She served at Memorial Sloan Kettering as a faculty member in the breast cancer program before joining the Division of Breast Oncology and Experimental Therapeutics Program at Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, in Tampa, Florida. Dr. Munster led the group as the Scientific Director of Breast Research and Co-Chair of the Phase I Program at Moffitt for six years prior to joining the University of California in San Francisco.

Currently Dr. Munster is Professor in Residence at the University of California, San Francisco, where she is also the Director of Early Phase Clinical Trials Program at the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and Program Leader of Developmental Therapeutics. Dr. Munster is Co-Director of the Center for BRCA Research, a BRCA-focused clinical and research program at the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCSF.

Her basic laboratory research interests are in the area of developing novel targeted therapy for the treatment of treatment resistant cancer and their integration into current treatment strategies. Dr. Munster's research interest involves basic research studies on epigenetic modification of DNA repair and therapy resistance. Her laboratory is involved in several projects testing HDAC inhibitors reverse hormone therapy resistance in breast cancer and to reengage the immune defense. Dr. Munster has a long standing interest in fertility preservation for young patients with cancer and germ line cancer mutations.

She is the lead investigators on several clinical trials involving early drug development for cancer, serves on NIH/NCI study sections and leads international cancer awareness campaigns on breast cancer and cervical cancer. Dr. Munster has published in numerous scientific journals and has given lectures on early drug development, breast cancer, clinical trials and translational research and is a strong advocate for patients with cancer germ line mutations.

William P. Tansey

William Tansey was born and raised in Sydney, Australia. He earned his B.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, where he studied processes that regulate human growth hormone production. After completing his doctoral studies in 1992, he moved to the United States to pursue further postdoctoral training at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. There, his work centered on unraveling the biochemical processes that human cells use to control gene activity. In 1997, he was promoted to the faculty of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and established his independent laboratory focusing on gene regulation and how it goes awry in cancer. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001 and full Professor in 2005 where he held the title Lita Annenberg Hazen Professor of Biological Sciences. During his time at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, he was actively involved in undergraduate and graduate education, serving as Assistant Director of the Undergraduate Research Program and as one of the architects, and Director, of the newly-established Watson School Graduate Program. In 2009, he moved to Vanderbilt University, where he is currently Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology and Ingram Professor of Cancer Research. He also serves as Co-Director of the Genome Maintenance Program for the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. Dr. Tansey's current research centers on developing new methods to therapeutically target the cancer-causing gene MYC, which causes the cancer-associated deaths of 100,000 Americans each year.

Taekyu Lee

Taekyu Lee, Ph.D. is a Research Assistant Professor of Biochemistry in Vanderbilt University. He is a member of the Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) and the Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology (VICB). Dr. Lee is a synthetic organic/medicinal chemist with extensive knowledge and experience in all phases of drug discovery process. Prior to joining Vanderbilt in October 2009, he served as a Principal Scientist at DuPont Pharmaceutical and Bristol-Myers Squibb Companies for 11 years through contribution to a number of drug discovery programs against CNS disorders, obesity and diabetes. During this time, he gained practical knowledge and experience in early drug discovery program development, hit-to-lead validation, optimization of efficacy and pharmaceutical properties of drugs through SAR, cheminformatics, and molecular modeling. He contributed in the advancement of 4 experimental drugs into the clinical development for Schizophrenia and obesity. Since 2009, Dr. Lee has worked with Professor Stephen Fesik at Vanderbilt University by leading multiple drug discovery programs using fragment-based methods and structure-based design. He has participated in the NExT program since 2013 by leading Mcl-1 inhibitor project, which is under collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim to develop novel anti-cancer drugs. Currently, He is a project leader for WDR5 inhibitor program sponsored by the NExT program. Throughout his industrial and academic career, Dr. Lee has been a co-inventor for more than 35 patents and co-author for 26 papers.

Jennifer R. Grandis

My research efforts are focused on elucidating and targeting key signaling pathways and genomic alterations in head and neck cancer with the goals of enabling precision medicine studies based on strong studies in relevant models. I have leveraged my access to head and neck cancer (HNC) patients and their biospecimens to optimize translational research studies that include developing novel therapies in the laboratory for clinical application as well as generating and interrogating relevant preclinical models to determine the underlying mechanism of clinical findings. In the past 5 years, I have helped lead the national efforts to determine the genetic and epigenetic landscape of HNC and now routinely deploy these findings to help guide efforts to deliver HNC precision medicine. I directed the Head and Neck Cancer Program at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute from 1998-2014, where I was a Distinguished Professor. In this capacity, I facilitated collaborations between clinicians and investigators with an emphasis of developing a robust research infrastructure to support clinical and translational cancer studies. I served as PI of the NCI-supported Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) in Head and Neck Cancer at the University of Pittsburgh from 2002-2014 and currently serve as Co-PI of the SPORE in a MPI format (through 2020). I served as the PI of two longstanding NIH T32s focused on training clinicians to combine research with clinical practice in head and neck oncology and otolaryngology, when at the University of Pittsburgh. Since 2008, I have been an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor.

Jason Gestwicki

Jason E. Gestwicki is a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and the Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He earned a Ph.D. from UW-Madison and performed a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University before starting his own research group at the University of Michigan. He re-located to UCSF in 2013, where his laboratory continues to use high throughput screening and drug-like small molecules to study the roles of molecular chaperones in protein misfolding diseases, such as cancer, neurodegeneration and cataracts. He has published ~160 manuscripts and been named an inventor on 14 patents related to this work. He also started Amplyx Pharmaceuticals (67M, Series C, 2017) and Viewpoint Therapeutics (30M, Series B, 2018).

Ingrid Wertz

I began my career at Genentech in 1998 as an NIH Biotechnology Training grant intern and had the opportunity to complete my graduate studies at Genentech. Here I witnessed the transformation of scientific discoveries into therapeutic agents. In this way I learned that rigorous scientific experimentation is the foundation for rational drug design. During my medical training I experienced how illness can transform the lives of patients and saw first hand the positive impact that effective medicines can have. After completing my graduate and medical studies I chose to return to Genentech as a scientist in order to help patients through scientific discoveries. My lab has two primary aims: 1) to identify and characterize enzymes and substrates that regulate pathogenic signaling pathways, with a focus on the ubiquitin system, and 2) to apply our understanding of disease mechanisms to develop novel therapeutic agents and to improve clinical trial treatment regimens. Understanding the molecular basis of normal physiology and of disease may enable us to translate those findings into novel therapeutics.

Adil Daud

Adil Duad, M.D., is a Clinical Professor at the Department of Medicine (Hematology/Oncology) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is also the Director of Melanoma Clnical Research at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Daud has developed and led many clinical trials that have expanded the use of gene therapy for melanoma. Prior to joining UCSF Medical Center, he was a researcher at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla. for seven years. Dr. Daud has won numerous awards, including the American Society for Clinical Oncology's Young Investigator award and Castle Connolly's Best Doctors in America award.

Natalia Jura

Natalia Jura, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the Cardiovascular Research Institute and at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco. The long-term goal of Dr. Jura's group is to develop an atomic-scale understanding of signaling transduction that will allow for its precise manipulation for effective and tolerable disease treatments. The current efforts of the group focus on enzymes involved in catalysis and regulation of protein phosphorylation, including receptor tyrosine kinases and transmembrane phosphatases. Dr. Jura's group also investigates alternative non-catalytic roles of protein kinases as scaffolds in cellular signaling pathways and seeks to identify small molecule inhibitors that target these poorly understood kinase functions in human diseases.

Mark Lackner

Vice President, Head of Biomarkers and Synthetic Lethal Biology
Mark has nineteen years' experience in oncology drug development with broad experience ranging from target identification through biomarker development in registrational clinical trials. He is Vice President and head of Biomarkers and Synthetic Lethal Biology at IDEAYA. Prior to joining IDEAYA, Mark worked at Genentech for 14 years in positions of increasing responsibility in the Oncology Biomarker Development group, most recently as a Director and Principal Scientist. At Genentech his group was accountable for predictive and pharmacodynamic strategies for candidate therapeutics spanning cancer signaling through immuno-oncology and was accountable for clinical biomarker strategies for over 20 development stage small molecule and antibody agents. His group developed clinical biomarker strategies for immune doublet combinations with the anti-PDL1 antibody Tecentriq, as well as phase III companion diagnostic strategies for the AKT inhibitor Ipatasertib and the MEK and BRAF inhibitors Cobimetinib and Vemurafenib. Mark also provided strategic leadership for the overall breast cancer biomarker strategy within the broader Roche organization. Prior to joining Genentech, Mark worked at Exelixis (NASDAQ: EXEL) from 1999 through 2004 in oncology target identification and validation, including the identification of synthetic lethal interactions with the tumor suppressor gene p53. Mark received his PhD from Stanford University in 1997 for studies on genetic analysis of RAS/MAP kinase signaling. He completed postdoctoral studies at UC Berkeley in the laboratory of Joshua Kaplan. He has authored over 55 peer reviewed scientific manuscripts in journals including Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Cancer Cell and Clinical Cancer Research.

Michelle Arkin

Michelle Arkin is a Professor in Pharmaceutical Chemistry, co-Director of the Small Molecule Discovery Center at UCSF and an Adjunct Professor at the Buck Institute for Aging Research. Michelle's research interests include developing biological tools and drug leads for cancer and neurodegenerative diseases and designing compounds to modulate the function of allosterically regulated enzymes and protein-protein interactions (PPI). As co-Director of the SMDC, Michelle collaborates with many academic and pharmaceutical laboratories to tackle challenging problems in drug discovery. She is also very active in the academic drug discovery community, as the current President of the Board of Directors for the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium, PI for the UCSF Center in the NCI Chemical Biology Consortium, and editorial board member for the Assay Guidance Manual and Current Protocols in Chemical Biology. She recently completed a term as reviews editor at Cell Chemical Biology. Michelle earned her Ph.D. in chemistry at Caltech in Jackie Barton's lab and then held a Daymon Runyon postdoctoral fellowship with Jim Wells at Genentech. She was among the first scientists at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, where she helped develop inhibitors of PPI, including lifitigrast, an FDA approved drug for dry eye (SARcode/Shire). From 2005 to 2007, she was the Associate Director of Cell Biology at Sunesis and led the translational science team for Vosaroxin, an anti-cancer agent in phase 3 clinical trials.

Charles Craik

The research interests of the Craik lab focus on defining the roles and mechanisms of enzymes and challenging membrane proteins in complex biological processes and on developing technologies to facilitate these studies. The primary emphasis of our work has been on enzymes and protein degradation mechanisms, and more recently on membrane transporters, with a particular emphasis on macromolecular recognition. Our original protein engineering studies have evolved to encompass various proteases as well as their endogenous inhibitors and membrane-bound receptors. We have developed a powerful new technology to detect and profile post-translational modifying enzymes using a multiplexed peptide library and mass spectrometry. We have also been developing recombinant antibody libraries and screening methods to identify conformationally selective antibodies for structural and functional studies. Our work leverages highly productive collaborations with the Cheng, Gross, Krogan and Stroud labs at UCSF to study protein degradation machinery and with the Evans, Kirkwood, Small, Munster, Van't veer, VanBrocklin and Fung labs for molecular oncology. The work has the potential to impact the fields of molecular virology and oncology by helping speed structure determinations and target validation of challenging targets and provide valuable data and reagents to both the research and clinical communities for validating new biomarkers, prognostics, imaging agents and cell biology tools for proteases and other markers associated with cancer.

James A. Wells

Jim pioneered the engineering of proteins, antibodies, and small molecules that target catalytic, allosteric, and protein-protein interaction sites. He developed technologies including protein phage display, alanine-scanning, engineered proteases for improved hydrolysis, bioconjugations, N-terminomics, disulfide "tethering" (a novel site-directed fragment-based approach for drug discovery), and more recently an industrialized recombinant antibody production pipeline for the proteome and protein-Seq. These lead to important new insights into protease mechanisms, growth factor signaling, hot-spots in protein-protein interfaces, role of caspases in biology, and more recently determining how cell surfaces change in health and disease. His team was integral to several protein products including Somavert for acromegaly, Avastin for cancer, and engineered proteases sold by Pfizer, Genentech and Genencor, respectively. At Sunesis where he was President and CSO his team discovered the LFA-1 antagonist, Lifitegrast, now FDA approved for dry eye disease through SARcode and sold by Shire. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers and inventor on more than 60 patents. Dr. Wells received a B.A. degree in biochemistry from the UC Berkeley, a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from Washington State University with Professor Ralph Yount, and completed postdoctoral studies at Stanford University Medical School with Professor George Stark. He joined Genentech in 1982 as a founding member of the Protein Engineering Department, Founded Sunesis Pharmaceuticals in 1998 and joined UCSF in 2005 now as Professor and former Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. In 1999 he was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015 elected member in the American Association of Arts and Sciences, and 2016 the National Academy of Inventors.