Speakers

Prof. Gallagher, whom is a cell and molecular biologist, has extensive experience in application of transcriptomic and proteomic approaches for biomarker discovery. Of particular relevance, his group has been actively involved in utilising tissue microarray technology for biomarker validation studies, with a particular focus on breast cancer and melanoma. Prof. Gallagher hosted the EMBO Molecular Medicine Conference for 2006 in Dublin (www.targetbreast.com). Finally, Prof. Gallagher is Co-Ordinator of a Marie Curie Transfer of Knowledge Industry-Academia Partnership programme, entitled Target-Breast, which is centred on validation of putative biomarkers arising from transcriptomic analysis of human breast tumours via tissue microarray technology.

Prof. Kay is a highly research active clinical pathologist, with a demonstrated track record in construction and application of tissue microarrays in biomarker validation. She is also involved, together with Prof. Gallagher and Dr. O’Shea, in a multi-institutional effort to advance online assessment of tissue microarray data. Prof. Kay’s research interests are in the area of bladder, breast and colorectal cancer.

Dr. Jorge Reis-Filho is the Team Leader of the Molecular Pathology Team at The Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Centre, Institute of Cancer Research, London. Dr Reis-Filho has extensive experience in generating high and low density tissue microarrays and in the application of DNA and RNA in situ hybridisation and immunohistochemistry to formalin fixed material and tissue microarrays. His research projects focus on the development of a refined classification for special types of breast cancer and on the identification of novel therapeutic targets for special types of breast cancer using a combination of traditional pathology methods and high throughput molecular techniques. Dr Reis-Filho is an associate editor of The Journal of Clinical Pathology and is a member of the editorial board of The Journal of Pathology and the International Journal of Surgical Pathology.

Dr. Hewitt, a clinician-scientist and practicising pathologist, is an acknowledged world-leader in the field of tissue microarrays. He currently heads the Tissue Array Research Program (TARP) at the US National Cancer Institute. Dr. Hewitt has been directly involved in key technological developments within this arena, including the pioneering use of infrared spectroscopy for assessment of histological specimens (Fernandez et al., Nature Biotech, 2006).

Prof. Cahill is Professor of Translation Science at UCD. She is an acknowledged world leader in the area of protein array technology. Her expertise in this area extends from construction of large-scale protein arrays to applying their use to identifying new biomarkers in immune-relevant disorders and cancer.

Prof. Jirstrom, a pathologist, has extensive experience in tissue microarray construction and analysis. She has created several large-scale tissue microarrays of breast cancer tissue, amongst other tumour types. Dr. Jirstrom actively collaborates with Prof. Gallagher and Dr. Brennan in the above-mentioned Marie Curie Transfer of Knowledge Industry-Academia Partnership programme.

Dr. Anna Asplund
Uppsala University

Sweden

Dr Anna Asplund, a cell biologist, is one of the team leaders in the Human Proteome Resource Project. The Human Proteome Resource project is set to generate antibodies towards the entire human proteome, and to use the antibodies for expression analysis in situ in a multitude of human tissues and cells. Her team is working with tissue microarray production, sectioning and high-throughput scanning of immunohistochemically stained slides. Dr Asplund's main focus has been to set up automated annotation of cell line images, and she is now involved in various research projects based on generated cell line data.

Dr. Donal O’Shea
School of Biotechnology
Dublin City University

Dublin, Ireland

Dr. O'Shea, a bioinformatician, has an extensive track record in telepathology. His group has instrumental behind the development of the online tissue microarray management tool, Virtual Tissue Matrix, which was previously mentioned (Conway et al., BMC Bioinformatics, 2006).

Dr. Allen H. Olson
Aperio Technologies

San Diego, CA

Dr. Olson has over 20 years experience in university, government, and private-sector scientific research and engineering development. He has a broad background in computational mathematics and numerical analysis and has applied this knowledge to solving image analysis problems for x-ray, microwave, and visible-wavelength imaging systems. Since joining Aperio in 2002, he has developed algorithms that enable automatic scanning of microscope slides, as well as colour and morphological image processing algorithms for quantification of histology and cytology images.  Dr. Olson has held Research Scientist positions at the University of California and the SPAWAR Naval Research Center in San Diego.  He has a BA in Applied Mechanics and Engineering Sciences from the Mechanics and Engineering Sciences from the University of California and a PhD in Geophysics from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Prof. Pádraig Cunningham
University College Dublin

Dublin, Ireland

Dr. Cunningham is Professor of Knowledge and Data Engineering in the School of Computer Science and Informatics at University College Dublin. His current research focus is on the use of machine learning techniques in processing high-dimension data, particularly bioinformatics and multimedia data. He has published extensively on the applications of supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques. His current research focus is on the application of machine learning techniques in image analysis and on using dimension reduction and feature selection techniques for biomarker discovery. 

Prof. Jan van Oostrum
Zeptosens

Witterswil, Switzerland

Prof. van Oostrum was recently appointed as Head Business Development at Zeptosens and is the former Head of the Protein Science and Technology Unit at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland.  Jan van Oostrum received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York and holds an affiliate faculty appointment at the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the McGill University in Montreal.
His main interest is on integration and application of protein micro-array technologies in order to obtain a “systems” perspective on diseases linked to molecular signaling pathways.

There will, in addition, be speakers from the following companies:

DEFINIENS

APERIO