Donna M. O’Brien, MHA, is a National Advisor with Manatt Health providing strategy development and program implementation advice to healthcare providers and research institutes. Prior to this, Donna served as Consultant to the Director of the NCI for nine years to support the development and implementation of a new program model for cancer care delivery and research expansion in 30 hospitals in 22 states. She was a member of the team that designed the NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP). She was also an executive at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Executive Vice President of the Catholic Health Long Island.

For over 7 years, Madeline Sparks Cresswell has been a respected member of Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), as she has dedicated her time, education and career to the institution’s research mission. Her career experience includes a background in human physiology and working in several clinical research roles over the last decade. Ms Cresswell received her MBA in Healthcare Management from OHSU, and utilized her experience, knowledge and passion to build a successful Affiliate Research Program. During her time in this role, she has streamlined processes, developed institutional policies, proactively identified regulatory and legal issues, and built relationships with three large healthcare institutions in Oregon.

Dushen Chetty, PhD, currently serves as the Global Program Head for Prostate Cancer at Novartis Oncology. In this role, he is responsible for developing innovative therapeutics for Prostate Cancer, with a specific focus on PSMA-targeted Radioligand Therapies. Additionally, he has played a crucial role in the development of CAR-T programs for Lymphoma and Multiple Myeloma. Prior to his current position, Dr Chetty successfully led programs that targeted BRaf malignancies and obtained regulatory approvals for Pediatric Glioma and BRaf Tumor Agnostic indications.

Before joining Novartis, Dr Chetty held the position of Senior Director at Janssen Oncology. During his time there, he led teams in designing groundbreaking medicine development strategies for radio-conjugates and bladder cancer programs. At GlaxoSmithKline, he led teams in worldwide business development and scientific licensing, where he evaluated new oncology opportunities and shaped business development strategies. In addition, he also led a joint venture in Singapore for two years, during which he fostered R&D capability through collaborative agreements with the Singapore Economic Development Board.

Dr Chetty is a distinguished scholar, having been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and obtaining a PhD from Rutgers University. He was also a British Council Scholar at King's College London. Prior to his industry career, Dr Chetty served as an Associate Professor at the University of Durban-Westville in South Africa, where he led a grant-funded research program.

Serena De Vita is a physician scientist with 20 years of experience in Hematology-Oncology in both the academic and industry settings. She has deep expertise in clinical trials, having designed and executed the clinical and translational development of first-in-human clinical programs across multiple modalities and indications and having directly contributed to the success of late-stage programs in hematology and oncology. Dr De Vita has a long-standing interest in developing cell and gene therapies.

She started her industry career in early development at AstraZeneca, before moving to Novartis to drive the clinical development of multiple cell therapy assets manufactured under their next generation manufacturing platform. At Novartis, Dr De Vita served in roles of increased responsibility, including Global Head of Hematology, and most recently she was the interim Global Head of Translational Clinical Oncology. In January 2025, she re-joined AZ as the Global Franchise Head and the Clinical Strategy Head for Cell therapies in Late Development Oncology.

Prior to embarking on a career in industry, she trained in malignant hematology in Italy (Policlinico Gemelli) and the UK (Queen Mary’s, Barts and the London), and then moved to the US to conduct translational research on basic mechanisms of leukemogenesis, hematopoietic stem cell biology and gene therapies at Dana Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center.

Jack Hoppin, PhD, is the CEO and co-founder of Ratio Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company with the mission to accelerate the development of next-generation precision radiopharmaceuticals for solid tumors and transform oncology treatment paradigms.

Dr Hoppin attended the College of the Holy Cross, studying Mathematics and Physics and went on to receive his doctorate from the University of Arizona in Applied Mathematics under Professor Harrison H. Barrett at the Center for Gamma Ray Imaging. Following his graduate studies, Dr Hoppin was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Research Center Jülich, Center for Electronics in Germany.

Dr Hoppin has over 20 years of research and business development experience in the field of Nuclear Medicine. His industry experience began at Bioscan, Inc. where he served as the Vice President of Imaging Systems and managed the development, launch and commercialization of the NanoSPECT/CT system. In 2008, he co-founded Invicro with the mission of providing innovative medical imaging data analytics and software to the pharmaceutical industry. Invicro was sold to Konica Minolta in 2017 and Dr Hoppin served as President of their Precision Medicine business unit from 2019 through 2021. Dr Hoppin began working with Noria Therapeutics in 2018, joining their board of directors in 2019 and supporting the subsequent funding of subsidiary PSMA Therapeutics. Dr Hoppin served as lead director as the Noria and PSMA Therapeutics organizations were sold to Bayer Healthcare in June of 2021. In conjunction with said transaction, he and fellow Noria teammates formed Ratio Therapeutics. Dr Hoppin serves on multiple boards in the Life Sciences space and is a founding member of Emit Imaging, Cerveau Technologies and Sentonix.

Antoine Iannessi, MD, currently holds the role of Head of Medical Affairs at Median Technologies (imaging CRO Business), where he actively supports various clinical trials in the field of oncology. With over a decade of experience as an interventional radiologist at the renowned Cancer Center Antoine Lacassagne in Nice, South of France, he has cultivated expertise in oncology and percutaneous procedures, particularly in the realms of pain palliation and tumor ablation.

Rachel Salazar, DHSc, is the SVP, R&D Strategy & Operations at Bicara Therapeutics. A passionate and adaptive organizational leader, Dr Salazar brings more than two decades of experience as a strategic drug development executive in both early and late-stage clinical development. Skilled in strategy development, portfolio management and prioritization, over the past 15 years, Dr Salazar has driven various clinical-stage assets in the oncology and immuno-oncology space to advance therapeutically meaningful and differentiated assets to patients.

Prior to joining Bicara, Dr Salazar has held various leadership roles with increasing responsibility in both R&D and Portfolio Management at Pfizer, Takeda Oncology and EMD Serono.

Dr Salazar holds both a Bachelor and Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis and Tufts University and earned her DHSc from Eastern Virginia Medical School.

Matthew Silver, PhD, serves as Head of Oncology Precision Medicine and Companion Diagnostics at Takeda. Dr Silver established and built the centralized CDx function at Takeda, where he and his team are accountable for global diagnostic strategy development and execution across the Oncology pipeline.

Before joining Takeda, Dr Silver was with EMD Serono where he was Director of Companion Diagnostics and Immuno-Oncology CDx Team Lead. In this role, Dr Silver had broad responsibility for Immuno-Oncology CDx strategy and served as CDx Lead for multiple late-stage programs. Prior to EMD, Dr Silver led the translational assays group at Cell Signaling Technology where he was responsible for product development to support their growing translational portfolio and external collaborations.

Dr Silver earned a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of New Hampshire, which was followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Wyeth Research. Dr Silver also holds a BS in Molecular and Cell biology from the University of Connecticut.

Diana Stoycheva, PhD, is a principal scientist with a Masters in Molecular Biotechnology from the University of Heidelberg. She holds a PhD in immunology from HU Berlin and pursued postdoctoral studies in Immunology at the ETH Zurich. Dr Stoycheva’s strong scientific background reflects her personal passion for immunology, immuno-oncology and specifically cell therapies. She joined Scailyte in 2020, evaluating opportunities to apply our AI to new projects in immunology and immuno-oncology.

Allison Kaeding, MD, is a Senior Director of Early Clinical Development for IO and Cell Therapy at BMS. Dr Kaeding leads early clinical development for BMS’s GPRC5D-targeted CAR T cell therapy, now entering pivotal and novel combination trials, since its lead nomination, and has conducted Phase 1 trials and clinical development for numerous other clinical-stage and pre-clinical cell therapy, cell engager, biologics and targeted degrader programs. She is the Clinical lead for the BMS partnership with Century Therapeutics to develop off-the-shelf induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived, engineered allogeneic cell therapies.

Dr Kaeding co-leads the BMS Cell Therapy Correlative Research Team, with bioinformatics expert Dr Julie Rytlewski, Director of Predictive Sciences, to apply cutting-edge data analytics including statistical modeling and machine learning to address pressing, clinically relevant questions impacting BMS. Cell Therapy portfolio development (and beyond). Leveraging BMS’s unparalleled breadth of cell therapy clinical trial experience, including curated data from 4700+ patients treated on 24 cell therapy trials with 6 distinct CAR T assets including Breyanzi and Abecma, the Cell Therapy Correlative Research Team uses big data to shape current and future BMS Cell Therapies.

Dr Kaeding is a pediatric hematologist-oncologist and stem cell transplant physician. She earned her Medical Doctorate at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and completed her fellowship training at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Seattle Children’s Hospital. Prior to joining industry at Juno Therapeutics/Celgene, she was an early career physician-scientist as an attending physician on the Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant service and bench researcher at Fred Hutch developing novel AML antibody-drug conjugates and other targeted therapeutics.

John Simmons, PhD, currently leads oncology biopharma partnerships at Natera. Before joining Natera, Dr Simmons completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and served as Vice President of Translational Medicine at Personal Genome Diagnostics (PGDx). He received his PhD in Tumor Biology from Georgetown University.

Jennifer Shaw Gibson Levy is Vice President, Education and System Academic Enterprise for Henry Ford Health. In this role, she provides system-wide strategic, operational, and financial management support for the academic mission of Henry Ford Health and works to identify and implement operational strategies and initiatives to address system, hospital, and medical education and research programmatic goals to ensure program quality and consistency.