Brief introduction:

Cancer Immunotherapy is to fight cancer with the patience's own immune system, and it has potential to induce long-lasting benefits without intolerable side effects in the human host. The development of cancer immunotherapy has gone through many trials and tribulations since Dr William Coley's serendipitous discovery in the 1890s, and for many years it has been sidelined to the fringes of mainstream oncology. Professor Ma will deliver a talk on "Cancer Immunotherapy – An Epic Trilogy of Serendipity, Skepticism and Scientific Breakthrough" to take the audience through a journey from the view of a cancer doctor to witness the renaissance of cancer immunotherapy in nasopharyngeal and other cancers.

About the Speaker:

Dr Brigette Ma is currently Professor and Honorary Consultant at the Department of Clinical Oncology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Honorary Professor, Department of Health Technology and Informatics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Medical Director of the Phase I Clinical Trial Centre (Oncology), The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery with Honours at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, and was awarded Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (2001), Fellow of Hong Kong College of Physicians (2004), and Doctor of Medicine (2014). She received post-graduate training at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute, Melbourne, and the Princess Margaret Hospital, Toronto. She has published extensively on novel systemic therapies in head and neck cancer, colorectal cancer and early phase clinical trials. Notably, she was the Principal Investigator of a multinational clinical trial of an immune checkpoint inhibitor in nasopharyngeal cancer in 2014, a study which was sponsored by the USA National Cancer Institute Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program (NCICTEP, Bethesda). This result of clinical trial has been reported in 2017 offers a new therapeutic option in patients with advanced nasopharyngeal cancer. Sub-studies are supported by Research Grants Council.

Since March 2017, Dr Ma has been a member of the US National Cancer Institute Head and Neck Steering Committee on Clinical Trial Planning for Nasopharyngeal Cancer, where she serves as a co-Chair in the Widely Metastatic Group for the development of new cancer immunotherapy trials. Dr Ma is a Faculty member of European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Gastrointestinal Cancer, and member of the ESMO Consensus Working Group for the management of metastatic colorectal cancer. She has been a member of the Joint Scientific Committee for Phase 1 Clinical Trials. She has served as Chair/ member of the Scientific/ Organizing committees of local and international conferences, notably, the American Association of Cancer Research, the European Society of Medical Oncology.

Brief introduction:

Ovarian cancer is one of the most lethal gynecologic malignancies worldwide. Different from other solid tumors, ovarian cancer is an intra-abdominal tumor in which the presence of ascites enables metastatic dissemination and correlates with poor prognosis. Malignant ascites provide a key reservoir of growth factors and nutrients to augment ovarian cancer aggressiveness. Dr Chan will give a talk titled "The tumor microenvironment on ovarian cancer progression and the potential target-based therapy" to share how all these factors are being studied to identify new principles leading to novel therapeutic avenues.

About the Speaker:

Dr. David Wai Chan is currently an Assistant Professor of the Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, LKS Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong. After receiving his PhD in molecular oncology from Monash University, Australia, he had completed postgraduate training at Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute in Melbourne, and Department of Pathology, the University of Hong Kong. He's particularly interested in blood cancers, liver cancers, childhood bone cancers, breast cancers and gynaecological malignancies. His current research interests include functional characterization of tumor suppressors and oncogenes and delineation of the related cellular signaling pathways which contribute to the tumorigenesis of gynaecological malignancies. He is particularly interested in the impacts of cancer cell metabolism and tumor microenvironment on ovarian cancer metastasis, development and chemoresistance. He has published 52 papers in high impact international journals such as Gastroenterology, EMBO, Clinical Cancer Research, Theranostics, Oncogene, and J Pathol etc. Dr. Chan currently serves on the editorial board of numerous high impact journals e.g. Journal of Ovarian Research, PlosOne, Cancer Medicine and Frontiers of Pharmacology of Anti-Cancer Drugs. He is also a reviewer for a number of international journals.