PARP inhibitors in Prostate Cancer

Dr Elena Castro is a Consultant Medical Oncologist at Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre in Madrid, Spain.  She treats patients with advanced bladder and prostate cancer, most of them within the context of clinical trials. She studied medicine and obtained a PhD from the University of Salamanca, Spain.  After training in medical oncology, she completed a four-year fellowship in Cancer Genetics at the Institute of Cancer Research, UK.   Later, she joined the Spanish National Cancer Research Center as a clinician-scientist.  Her research has focused on addressing the clinical implications of genetic and genomic variants in prostate cancer, receiving several awards for her work. She has also authored numerous articles published in international peer-reviewed journals including some relevant papers on the impact of germline variants in prostate cancer.   

Dr Elena Castro has received financial support/sponsorship for research support, consultation, or speaker fees from the following companies:

AstraZeneca, Bayer, Janssen, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, Synlab and Telix. 

Dr. Wyatt is an associate professor in Urologic Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a senior research scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre and a senior scientist at BC Cancer. Dr. Wyatt has a DPhil in genetics from the University of Oxford. His research goals are to identify associations between genomic alterations and patient outcomes in metastatic prostate and bladder cancer, and to translate these findings into clinical biomarkers. Dr. Wyatt has developed novel laboratory and computational techniques to study plasma circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA). Through application of these methods to clinical trial cohorts, his team has demonstrated that ctDNA is highly representative of metastatic lesions, and that somatic alterations detected in ctDNA can help predict prostate cancer therapy resistance or response.

Prof. Attard is a Cancer Research UK Clinician Scientist and Team Leader at The Institute of Cancer Research and an Honorary Medical Oncology Consultant at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK. He graduated with a degree in Medicine from the University of Malta in June 1999 and obtained a PhD in Medicine from the University of London (ICR) in 2010. His main research interest is dissecting treatment resistance, currently with a focus on plasma DNA analysis, in order to inform on the development of novel therapeutics and biomarkers for castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). He is an experienced clinical trialist in CRPC and a co-author of more than 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts, including several important papers on advanced prostate cancer. Prof. Attard’s many awards over the years include the ASCO Foundation Annual Merit Award in 2007, Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investor Award in 2008, the AACR-GlaxoSmithKline Outstanding Clinical Scholar Award in 2009, the Medical Research Society/Academy of Medical Sciences Sue McCarthy Prize in 2010 and the McElwain award in 2010. Prof. Attard sits on a number of advisory boards and the editorial board of Annals of Oncology.

Prof. Gerhardt Attard has received financial support/sponsorship for research support, consultation, or speaker fees from the following companies:

Astellas, AstraZeneca, Bayer,  Janssen, Novartis and Pfizer. 

Steven Joniau graduated in Urology in 2002 at the Catholic University of Leuven. In 2003, he was appointed full-time staff member at the Dept. of Urology, University Hospitals Leuven after a 1-year fellowship at the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff, UK. In July 2012, he obtained his PhD in Medical Sciences entitled ‘High-risk localized prostate cancer: the role of surgery and the development of clinical outcome prediction models’. In 2013, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven. His principal field of interest is the management of urological cancers. He is heavily involved in uro- oncological surgery and the multidisciplinary approach of pelvic cancers. He also leads numerous research projects at the University Hospitals Leuven, which focus on lymph node staging in prostate cancer, surgical management and biomarker development of high-risk prostate cancer, the natural history of premalignant lesions of the prostate, chemoprevention of prostate and bladder cancer, minimally invasive treatment of renal cell cancer and prostate cancer, etc. Steven Joniau is scientific secretary of the BVU (Belgische Vereniging voor Urologie), he is past- chairman of the Renal Cell Carcinoma Group of the Young Academic Urologists Working Party of the EAU, he is member of the EAU Guideline Panel on Prostate Cancer and the SIOG Prostate Cancer Guideline Panel. He is also a member of several international scientific societies: EAU, SIU (Société Internationale d’Urologie), SIOG (International Society of Geriatric Oncology) and EORTC GUCG (European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer, Genito-Urinary Cancers Group). He is appointed Associate Editor of ‘The Journal of OncoPathology’. He is Editorial Advisory Board member of ‘The European Journal of Surgical oncology’, Editorial Board member of ‘The Open Prostate Cancer Journal’, ‘Archivo Italiano di Urologia e Andrologia’, ‘The Central European Journal of Urology’ and International Scientific Board member of ‘Archivos Españoles de Urología’. Steven Joniau has received several international awards, of which the First prize of the Urological Challenge Session, received at the 2010 European Urology Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the Crystal Matula Award 2011, received at the 2011 EAU annual congress in Vienna, Austria and the biannual Orion International Oncology Award 2011, received at the 2011 EAU annual congress in Vienna, Austria are the most prestigious. In the last 10 years, he has published >170 papers in peer-reviewed journals in the field of uro- oncology and minimally invasive surgery. He received the Prize for the Best Paper published on Clinical Research in the Urological Literature at the EAU annual congress in Stockholm. He authored several book chapters, he has been invited Faculty in over 85 international congresses and is a faculty member of the ESU (European School of Urology).