AICCRDD2025 | Drug Development Conference | Clinical Oncology Conference | Paris | France | Top conference in Cancer | Summit | Meeting | Registration | Abstract Submission | Topic

Prof. Mats Ljungman

University of Michigan, USA

Title: KLIPP: Targeting Cancer with CRISPR

I grew up in Stockholm, Sweden. After attending 4 years of college studies in the USA, i landed a graduate student position in the lab of Professor Gunnar Ahnström at Stockholm University in Sweden. My thesis was entitled “The role of chromatin in the induction and repair of DNA damage”. I performed my postdoctoral work, in the laboratory of Dr. Phil Hanawalt at Stanford University, where I developed a new technique that uses the ability of psoralen to “sense” torsional tension in DNA to probe for “unconstrained DNA torsional tension” in the genomes of living cells. In 1994, my family and I moved to Ann Arbor where I became Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Michigan Medical School where I have been ever since. My early work identified blockage of transcription as a major trigger of p53 and apoptosis after DNA damage. To map transcription genome-wide and to investigate the effect of DNA damage on ongoing transcription we developed Bru-seq, which is based on bromouridine labeling of nascent RNA followed by immunocapturing and deep sequencing of the Bru-labeled RNA. We were fortunate to be invited to ENCODE3 to develop these techniques and to ENCODE4 where we now participate as a mapping center. We recently developed Precision KLIPP Therapy as a universal and specific cancer-targeting approach.
Publications: 139 peer-reviewed articles

Organizational contributions

Annual Midwest DNA Repair Symposium. I co-founded the Midwest DNA Repair group and organized the first symposium in Ann Arbor in 1999. The 22nd Annual Midwest DNA Repair Symposium was to be held in Iowa in 2020 but was postponed because of COVID.

President for the Environmental Mutagen Society (EMS) and Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomics Society (EMGS). I have been a long-time member of the EMS/EMGS and had the privilege to serve as the president 2012-2013. I was the program chair for the Annual EMS meeting in Seattle in 2012.

The Center for RNA Biomedicine. I co-founded and am the co-director of the Center for RNA Biomedicine at the University of Michigan

Dr. Olivier E. Pardo

Imperial College - Division of Cancer, UK

Title: RSK4: a new regulator of lung cancer progression

Olivier E. Pardo graduated from Paris-V University, France with a MSc in Molecular Biology (1995) and a Doctorate in Industrial Pharmacy (1997). He then moved to the UK to complete his PhD at Imperial College-London (2002). He subsequently joined the laboratory of Prof. Julian Downward at the CRUK-London Research Institute as a post-doctoral fellow, working on the regulation of apoptosis and cell migration. In 2006, he became team leader at Imperial College-London, Department of Surgery and Cancer where he created the Cellular Regulatory Networks lab. His team focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying chemo-resistance and metastasis in cancers with a special focus on the role played by S6 kinase isoforms. This involves multidisciplinary collaborations with other labs in the UK, France, the US, Germany, Canada and China bringing in biochemistry, molecular biology, chemistry, physics and computing expertise. The data generated by his lab led to the initiation of several clinical trials in lung and breast cancer patients. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and a member of the British Association for Cancer Research, the American Association for Cancer Research and the Biochemical Society.

Keynote Speakers