Stefan Rutkowski is the director of the Department of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany. The Department of Paediatric Haematology and Oncology at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf is one of the largest centres of its kind in Germany. His main clinical experience is in the diagnosis and treatment of pediatric hematology-oncology patients with a special interest in central nervous system tumors and neuro-oncology. UKE disposes of expertise and modern technologies in all involved disciplines relevant to paediatric CNS tumours, e.g. neurosurgery, neuropathology, neuroradiology, radiotherapy, and paediatric oncology.
He has extensive knowledge in innovative treatments for children with CNS tumors, including early clinical trials, target therapy, cancer predisposition syndromes, cell and gene therapy, and AI. As GPOH-mandated chair of the HIT-MED study group for children with medulloblastoma, ependymoma and other malignant CNS tumors, various national and European clinical trials on pediatric brain tumours including assessment of neurocognitive impairment have been/are conducted from UKE, and he is Principal Investigator and Sub-Investigator for various of those phase I/II/III trials (e.g. SIOP PNET5 MB).
He is engaged in several working groups, in particular speaker of phase I/II-trial Network North-West, member of the ITCC Brain Tumor Group and of the SIOP Europe Brain Tumor Group. In addition, he is part of EU-funded projects ERNPaedCan and SCARLET, for which he organizes at UKE case-specific tumor boards for European children with CNS tumors.
Chris Jones is Professor of Childhood Brain Tumour Biology at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. He is Head of the Division of Cancer Biology and the Paediatric Glioma Research Group; he co-leads the newly established ICR/Royal Marsden Hospital Centre for Children and Young People's Cancer and is Director of the Brain Tumour Research-funded Paediatric High Grade Glioma Centre of Excellence.
He received his PhD in Molecular Biology at the University of London, and did postdocs carrying out molecular profiling of breast cancer subtypes at the Ludwig Institute, University College London and the Breakthrough Breast Cancer labs at the Institute of Cancer Research. In 2003 he started his own lab in childhood cancer at the ICR, focusing on high grade and diffuse midline glioma in children and young adults, publishing some of the earliest and largest studies of the disease. His work spans multi-comic molecular characterisation, model development, mechanistic biology and preclinical screening.
He has played an active role in integrating biology into clinical trials via numerous international collaborative groups. He was the founding Chair of the SIOP Europe High Grade Glioma Biology Subgroup, is on the Steering Committee for the European ITCC-Brain Network, and is Pre-Clinical Lead and Co-Chair of the International CONNECT Consortium.
Dr. Laura Broutier completed her PhD at the Cancer Research Center of Lyon (CRCL, France) under the supervision of Dr. Patrick Mehlen, investigating mechanisms of cancer cell resistance to death. She then joined Dr. Meritxell Huch's laboratory at the Gurdon Institute, Cambridge (UK), where she developed the first tumor-derived organoid models of hepatic carcinoma and established their applications for drug screening and translational research.
Since 2018, Dr. Broutier holds a permanent Inserm researcher position at CRCL within the "Childhood cancer & cell state" team. She currently leverages organoid technology and single-cell approaches to decipher mechanisms of treatment resistance and relapse in pediatric cancers, with a focus on developing innovative therapeutic strategies for these rare diseases with limited experimental models.
Marita Partanen is a pediatric neuropsychologist and group leader at the Princess Máxima Center in the Netherlands. The focus of her research is on the early identification and intervention of neuropsychological problems, including evaluating new assessment methods and individualized interventions for children with brain tumours.