MTCI Symposium
22 September 2011 | In
MTCI Symposium Targets Tissues and Trials Guest Speakers
Lajos Pusztai, M.D., DPhil
Professor, Breast Medical Oncology
Dr. Lajos Pusztai, Professor of Medicine, leads the pharmacogenomic program in the Department of Breast Medical Oncology at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Pusztai is a practicing medical oncologist and clinical researcher who published over 150 peer-reviewed articles on the biology and treatment of breast cancer. His research focuses on the developing pharmacogenomic markers of response to therapy and identifying methods to select the optimal treatment for individual patients. His group has proposed new clinical trial designs for predictive marker evaluation, introduced new pathologic measurements of residual cancer after neoadjuvant chemotherapy, created web-based chemotherapy response prediction models based on routine clinical variables and proposed genomic markers of chemo- and endocrine-therapy sensitivity. Dr. Pusztai is principal investigator of several clinical trials investigating new drugs and potential response markers. His research is supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute, the US Department of Defense, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and philanthropic research grants.
Donald A. Berry, Ph.D.
Donald Berry is a professor in the Department of Biostatistics of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. He was founding Chair of this department in 1999. Dr. Berry received his Ph.D. in statistics from Yale University, and previously served on the faculty at the University of Minnesota and at Duke University. He has held endowed faculty positions at Duke University and M.D. Anderson. Since 1990 he has served as a faculty statistician on the Breast Cancer Committee of the Cancer and Leukemia Group B (CALGB), a national oncology group. In this role he has designed and supervised the conduct of many large U.S. intergroup trials in breast cancer. Through Berry Consultants, LLC he has designed many innovative designs of clinical trials for pharmaceutical and medical device companies and for federally funded collaborations in many different diseases. He is well known as a developer of Bayesian adaptive designs that efficiently use information that accrues over the course of the trial. These trials minimize sample size while increasing the likelihood of detecting drug activity. Under his direction the Department of Biostatistics at M.D. Anderson designed over 300 clinical trials that take a Bayesian approach. He is co-developer (with Giovanni Parmigiani) of BRCAPRO, a widely used program that provides individuals’ probabilities of carrying mutations of breast/ovarian cancer susceptibility genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. Dr. Berry is the author of several books on biostatistics and over 300 published articles, including first-authored articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Nature. Dr. Berry has been the principal investigator for numerous research grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Dr. Constance Albarracin, MD, Ph.D.
Dr. Constance Albarracin is a surgical pathologist and tenured professor at MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston. She did her pathology residency training at the University of Chicago Medical School after her MD degree from the University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines and her PhD degree in Physiology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Dr. Albarracin did her postdoctoral fellowship at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. She subspecialized in Breast and Gynecologic Pathology at the Beth Israel
Hospital in Boston and at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Currently an Associate Professor at MD Anderson, she is now studying the role of microRNAs in early cancer development and BRCA. She has developed her research in preneoplastic lesions and early events of breast and uterine cancer progression.
