Transforming curative cancer treatments

Peter Liu has a decade of experience in cancer and molecular biology research and health innovation translation. He has clinical medicine training from the University of Toronto and completed a DPhil in Clinical Medicine at the University of Oxford where he was the recognized as an Oxford-Hoffman International Scholar and Jesus College Graduate Scholar for academic merit. He was President of the Oxford University Scientific Society, oldest society of its kind in the world, and the Executive Director of BRIGHT International, a health innovation think tank focusing on strategic implementation of medical innovations. His cancer research and medical innovation experiences span four continents, including having worked at the World Health Organisation.

Andreas Halner has a unique combination of medical and mathematical training. Andreas completed pre-clinical medicine and a DPhil in Clinical Medicine and Machine Learning at the University of Oxford. Andreas is a St Johns’ College, University of Oxford Casberd Scholar for academic excellence. He holds the Pathology Tutor for Medicine post at St John’s College. Andreas is also the Chief Data Scientist of a European Clinical Research Collaboration on lung disease and has designed statistical analysis plans for a European-wide clinical trial. He has designed multiple new mathematical and clinical paradigms for defining disease states, developing algorithms for treatment outcome prediction and treatment monitoring.

Junetha Syed Jabarulla graduated from Madurai Kamaraj University (India) in Microbial gene Technology. Following her Master’s she worked at the Department of Biotechnology, IIT Madras focusing on the Functional characterization of RASSFs in Lung adenocarcinoma through whole transcriptomics analysis. She received the Mitsubishi Corporation International Scholarship during her PhD in Chemical Biology at Kyoto University, Japan. Her PhD thesis focused on developing programmable DNA-binding small molecules as a therapeutic strategy to target the oncogene EVI1 at the transcription level. Following her PhD, Junetha joined as a Post-Doctoral researcher in the Department of Oncology, University of Oxford where she was working with DNA Repair in Cancer Treatment and Chromosome integrity groups on the identification of HDAC inhibitor targets in DNA repair pathway to lead new drug combinations or biomarker to increase the efficiency of radiotherapy and targeting H3K36me3-deficient cancer cells with new class of WEE1 inhibitor respectively. With more than a decade experience in target and biomarker discovery in cancer research Junetha has joined OXcan as a chief scientist.

Daniel Szulc is a physiologist turned engineer with a passion for innovation, collaboration, and communication. After completing a double major in physiology and chemistry he went on to achieve a doctorate in biomedical engineering at the University of Toronto, where he was recognized as a UofT Top Scholar and Graduate to Watch for his impact as a STEM innovator and role model. His academic and industrial research spans the fields of biology, chemistry, medicine and physics and has led to several peer-reviewed manuscripts, inventions and collaborative projects awarded millions of research funding geared towards clinical translation. Alongside his passion for research and discovery, Daniel has actively sought to promote scientific communication and translation by leading the operations and strategic initiatives of both a national not-for-profit, Science Rendezvous, and an early-stage medtech start-up, Integral Health Systems, which developed next-generation software tools for surgical staff and medical personnel. Through these endeavours, he established national initiatives which engaged 25,000 students and created interdisciplinary networks with over 1600 scientists, clinicians, and engineers from 100 different academic disciplines across North America.

Iliyana has over a decade of experience in proteomics and mass spectrometry. She graduated from the University of Sheffield with a Masters of Science degree with honours in Medical Genetics and a PhD in Molecular Biology. In the early years of her scientific career, she worked on anti-cancer drug resistance, genetic mutations of Von Willebrand disease and novel centromeric chromatin components. During her PhD, Iliyana combined her interest in Genetics and Proteomics when she engineered genetic mutants of yeast in order to study protein interactions by mass spectrometry and microscopy techniques. In 2016, she did an internship at Oxford University Innovation where she increased her awareness of technology transfer and intellectual properties. After that, Iliyana continued to do research in the Proteomics field for several years before joining OXcan in 2023. Most recently, she worked on Covid-19 biomarker discovery at the University of Liverpool. Iliyana is a member of the British Mass Spectrometry Society and the British Society for Proteomes Research.

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Harini is a keen scientist and biotechnologist with over 7 years of international training experience in cancer research. She received her first graduate level MSc degree in Infection biology from Uppsala University, Sweden and focussed on working with oncolytic viral vectors as effective novel approaches for targeted cancer treatment. She then pursued a second MSc degree in Biomedical Technology from Robert Gordon University, Scotland.

As an immunoassay scientist passionate about working with molecular biology techniques, she is dedicated to advancing cancer early detection through her collaborative work with the OXcan team.

Safia is a Senior Machine Learning Scientist with over 10 years of experience in machine learning and deep scientific understanding of medical data, driven by a genuine passion for improving healthcare and patient outcomes.

Her achievements include the development of Class-1 medical devices used in NHS hospitals, extensive analyses of anonymised medical data to discover novel medical insights, the creation of new and effective approaches to diagnosing complex diseases at early stages and providing personalised treatment pathways for patients.

She completed a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil and worked as a post-doctoral fellow to identify how healthcare can benefit from the application of machine learning models for complex and high-dimensional medical data.

She has since worked as a Machine Learning Researcher in digital healthcare solutions bringing vital skills and valuable efforts in digitising healthcare.

Safia also holds masters and engineering degrees in Computer Science from the University of Bejaia, Algeria.

Luke Hankey graduated from the University of Liverpool in 2019 with a degree in Biological and Medical Sciences with a project focus on lysis of cancer cells. Throughout his studies, he acquired the Liverpool Excellence Scholarship as merit for his work. He has since developed applications to showcase his passion for coding and combined this with his strong academic background. He has now moved into the field of Machine Learning as a Junior Programmer to aid in the statistical analysis of biological and clinical datasets.

Ella Mi is a medical doctor specializing in oncology with a dual background in computer science. She holds an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellowship in medical oncology at Oxford, and has led preclinical and clinical cancer research studies at the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, with notable research achievements that includes identifying the most common genetic alteration in splenic marginal zone lymphoma, leading a longitudinal gastric cancer screening study and a machine learning programme to improve prognostication of brain tumours, which won the prestigious National Cancer Research Institute Award and received media coverage internationally. She obtained a 1st class Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and a medical degree at the University of Cambridge and has undertaken her Masters in Computer Science at the University of Oxford as a DeepMind Scholar. Ella has a keen interest in accelerating the clinical uptake of new medical technologies, and previously worked on Interventional Procedures at NICE and on commercial projects with Google Health and Huma.

Zhu is a proteomic scientist, who is passionate about biotechnology and medicine. He received his first PhD in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology in Peking Union Medical College, Tsinghua University (Wu Hsien Prize, 2018), where he focused on the investigation of non-coding RNA in pulmonary diseases using next-generation sequencing, and quantitative analysis of ribonucleoside modifications in RNA using UPLC-MS/MS. He is currently finishing his second D.Phil in Clinical Medicine (CAMS-Oxford Innovative Talent Studentship) in TDI Mass Spectrometry Laboratory, University of Oxford, where he focused on spatiotemporally mapping protein-protein interaction networks using mass spectrometry-based proteomic approaches (APEX2 proximity labelling-MS, affinity purification-MS, and LOPIT). With more than eight years of experience in multi-omic approaches (transcriptomics, proteomics and interactomics), Zhu joined OXcan as a proteomic scientist.