Dr Malmström worked as a senior consultant at the Department of Oncology at the Unviersity Hospital in Linköping until 2009, where she was in charge of the breast cancer and neuro-oncology group.  She is a member of the Swedish National Brain Tumour Group, the Scandinavian Neuro-Oncology Society and also the Nordic Clinical Brain Tumour Study Group.  She has initiated and conducted studies in neuro-oncology and breast cancer, including the recent phase III multi-centre randomised controlled Nordic trial for elderly patients with glioblastoma, which addressed clinical outcomes as well as quality of life issues in this challenging patient group.  She has also written popular science information on neuro-oncology for the general public.

 

 

 

 

Wai Hoe Ng is Senior Consultant Neurosurgeon and director of Surgical Neuro-oncology at the National Neuroscience Institute, Singapore.  He is Adjunct Associate Professor and a Co-Director of the Neurobiology Laboratory at Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School, Singapore.  He is a graduate (MBBS) from the medical school at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 1994 and underwent neurosurgical residency training at the National Neuroscience Institute (Singapore), Royal Melbourne Hospital and Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia.  He is a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (FRACS) and Board Certified in Neurosurgery by the Specialist Accreditation Board of the Ministry of Health, Singapore.  He also has a Doctorate in Medicine by Research (MD) from the National University of Singapore.

He underwent subspecialty fellowship training in neuro-oncology at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, and doctoral training in basic neuro-oncology research at the National University of Singapore under the auspices of a scholarship from the Singapore Millennium Foundation.  He also underwent further subspecialty fellowship training in stereotactic and functional neurosurgery at the Toronto Western Hospital, University of Toronto, Canada, and in paediatric neurosurgery/paediatric epilepsy surgery at the Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, Canada.  He was Sugita Fellow and visiting scholar at Nagoya University, Japan.  A/Prof Ng has a keen academic interest and has published over 50 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and a few book chapters.  He is the Deputy Editor for the Asian Journal of Neurosurgery and is a member of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience, World Neurosurgery, Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery, Journal of Central Nervous Disease, The Open Neurosurgery Journal, Neural Regeneration Research, and Asia-Pacific Oncology and Haematology. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

Dr Gottardo is a graduate in Medicine from the University of Leeds Medical School, Leeds, United Kingdom.  He undertook Paediatric training and a Fellowship in Paediatric Oncology and Haematology at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children.  During this fellowship, he completed a PhD in Paediatric Cancer Biology at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, under the supervision of Professor Ursula Kees.  He was awarded his PhD in December 2008.  He completed a three-year Fellowship in Paediatric Neuro-Oncology at St Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, USA, one of the leading  instituteions in the world for research and treatment of childhood brain tumours, under the supervision of Professors Richard Gilbertson and Amar Gajjar.  Dr Gottardo developed extensive experience and expertise with mouse modesl of cancer and the molecular characterisation of tumour samples, having developed the first spontaneous mouse model of ependymoma during his fellowship at St Jude Children's Research Hospital.  Dr Gottardo presented this work at the International Symposium on Paediatric Neuro-Oncology (ISPNO) in Chicago 2008, the premier paediatric Neuro-Oncology conference held bi-annually, and was awarded the Young Investigator Award for scientific excellence.

 

In August 2008 he commenced a position as a Consultant Paediatric Oncologist/Neuro-Oncologist at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children and in January 2009 he was awarded the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research and University of Western Australia John Lillie Childhood Cancer Research Fellowship to establish his own Brain Tumour Research laboratory and he was appointed co-leader of the Brain Tumour Programme.

 

His main area of interest lies in the molecular pathogenesis of paediatric brain tumours, with a special interest in translational research, with an emphasis on molecular targeted therapies.  Since establishing his own laboratory at The Telethon Institute for Child Health Research he has developed novel orthotopic xenograft mouse tissue model systems, utilising a unique panel of brain tumour cell lines established from primary paediatric patient tumour tissue.  His laboratory routinely isolates and cultures tumour cells from primary patient specimens in order to establish additional models.  He is a member of the Children's Oncology Group (COG), a large US-based international clinical trial cooperative group.  He was recently appointed Study Chair for the upcoming COG Average Risk Medulloblatoma Phase III clinical trial.  He is also Princial Investigator for the Australian Children's Cancer Trials (ACCT) group for Princess Margaret Hospital for Children, a cooperative group whose aim is to establish early phase drug development programmes in Australia for children with resistant or recurrent cancer.  He will take over as co-chair of ACCT in 2012.

 

 

After completing a PhD in 1993 at Monash University, where he worked on interferon and melanoma, A/Prof Johns joined Prof Claude Bernard's multiple sclerosis group.  During his time there, he developed a new animal model of multiple sclerosis that remains the gold standard today.   In 1998, A/Prof Johns commenced at the Ludwig Institute in Melbourne and went on to establish the Oncogenic Signalling Laboratory.  The main focus of the laboratory was the development of antibodies that target receptors important to the survival and growth of cancer.  Of particular note was the development of mAb 806, a cancer-specific antibody directed to the EGFR that has been licensed to Abbot.  A/Prof Johns joined Monash University in March 2008, moving his laboratory with him.  He continues to develop novel therapeutic antibodies designed to treat cancer.  He has an emphasis on glioma and receptor tyrosine kinase networks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr Thomas Mikeska is a Senior Postdoctoral Rsearcher in the laboratory of A/Prof Alexander Dobrovic at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne, and also an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia.  His research includes genetic and epigenetic alterations of cancer-related genes.  In addition, he has a strong research interest in the development of diagnostically-friendly DNA methylation detection methodologies and in the design of gene-specific DNA methylation-based biomarker assays, in particular for MGMT.