Therapeutic Combinations Symposium

Biography

Prof. Kishony is the Marilyn and Henry Taub Professor of Life Sciences at the Faculty of Biology, Faculty of Biomedical Engineering (secondary) and Faculty of Computer Science (secondary) at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Prof. Kishony received his B.A. in Physics and Mathematics from the Hebrew University and his Ph.D. in Physics from Tel-Aviv University (1999). He moved to Biology as a postdoc at Princeton and Rockefeller Universities and continued as a Bauer Fellow at Harvard University. In 2005 he joined the newly established Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, where he was rapidly promoted to a Full Professor (2011). He joined the Technion in 2014 to lead interdisciplinary research at the interface of quantitative biology and biomedicine.

Prof. Kishony is a world-renowned pioneer in developing and applying mathematical, computational, and experimental tools at the frontiers of biomedicine with a specific focus on antimicrobial multi-drug therapy. He uniquely bridges from elegant and daring experimental approaches, through bold new conceptual, theoretical, and computation ideas, to impactful bioinformatics research-to-bedside discoveries. 

His lab has made a series of ground-breaking discoveries, showing how some drug interactions can select against resistance, unraveling mechanisms that keep resistance in check-in natural ecological environments, and pioneered unique experimental and theoretical methodologies for tracking the whole-genome evolution of pathogenic bacteria. The video of his experiment of evolving bacteria on a “MEGA-plate” was viewed more than 30 million times, making it one of if not the most viewed science videos in the world. These new approaches and discoveries inspire novel treatment paradigms for effective antimicrobial chemotherapy and genome-based diagnostics. 

Most recently, Kishony has developed approaches to harness the power of AI for transparent and human-verifiable scientific research.

Biography

Jennifer Roth is the Director of the PRISM team within the Cancer Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Over the past 12 years, she has led the growth of PRISM from a post-doc project into a robust multi-disciplinary platform. PRISM is a high-throughput multiplexed therapeutic profiling technology spanning over 900 DNA-barcoded cancer cell lines. PRISM elucidates drug mechanisms of action by correlating drug treated viability profiles with the Cancer Dependency Map functional and baseline genomic feature sets. A co-author of more than 50 publications, Jennifer's work has generated data critical to supporting numerous Investigational New Drug (IND) filings. Prior to the Broad Institute, she spent over a decade in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry in oncology and immunology drug development, including contributing to the first FDA-approved HDAC inhibitor at Merck. She holds a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of New Hampshire, an M.A. in Biology from Brown University, and an M.B.A. in Strategy and Business Analysis from Boston University. 

Biography

Jeffrey West is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrated Mathematical Oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. The goal of his research group is to aid in targeting anti-cancer treatment resistance by constructing mathematical models of 1) tumor evolution and heterogeneity and 2) evolutionary-minded treatment strategies, employing techniques such as agent-based modeling, dose response convexity analysis (second-order effects), and evolutionary game theory. These methods are broadly applicable to many cancer types, but recent publications have focused on applications to head & neck cancers and hematologic malignancies. He is the founding editor of "This Week in Mathematical Oncology," a weekly newsletter publication which curates recent publications, preprints and blog posts to its 2,500 subscribers for nine years running.