Carlos is a leading executive with over 30 years of worldwide experience in the healthcare industry and a track record of excellence in sales, marketing, and finance. He has served as Regional Vice President at Novartis and Eli Lilly around the world leading organizations to accelerated growth and expansion.
Carlos currently serves as Board Member of Skalar Pharma, Welwaze, and as Advisor to Es Vicis in Switzerland. He has also served on the Board of PAHO Foundation and the International Advisory Board of Baptist Hospital in Miami. Other advisory roles include the FIU School of Business, and e-Nova San Andres University in Buenos Aires. He previously chaired the Pharma Association in LATAM.
His main career interests have focused on contributions to expand access to medicine and care worldwide, including the End Malaria Initiative at Novartis and launching the largest pharmaceutical loyalty program in the world in Brazil. Regarding his own experience with cancer, Carlos says he and his family were lucky: his wife discovered an abnormal lump that turned out to be stage 0 breast cancer, but he knows that too many women still discover it too late. He says, “Working in early detection gives a name and a face to our purpose.”
Matt De Silva is the Co-Founder and CEO of Notable Labs. Notable is accelerating the process of determining which drugs or combinations are most likely to be effective for pediatric cancer patients. The company has built an automated laboratory that rapidly evaluates thousands of drug combinations on cancer cells relative to healthy cells. A report is generated which prioritizes the drugs that are most specifically active against cancer cells. Notable is actively focused on children with blood cancer, partnering with physician researchers at MD Anderson, Seattle Children’s, Stanford, University of Kansas, and UCSF, among others. Notable was founded in 2014 by Matt in an effort to find treatment options for his father who was diagnosed with Glioblastoma Multiforme, a deadly stage 4 brain cancer that recently claimed the lives of Beau Biden, John McCain, and Ted Kennedy. Headquartered in Foster City, California, the company employs more than 30 scientists and engineers and has raised over $22M from prominent venture capital firms such as Builders VC, First Round Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Capital, and Y Combinator.
Karl is a senior executive with more than 25 years of experience in managing international business operations. Improving diagnostics and treatment of cancer has been the major theme throughout his entire career. He started in the early 1990s at Siemens Medical developing PET imaging from research to clinical practice maturity. He then played a key role in successfully launching the CyberKnife, providing a very effective radiosurgical option for cancer treatment.
SafeHeal was founded in 2015 by MDSTART, a Paris-based incubator. Its Colovac device aims to avoid the need for a diverting ostomy in patients undergoing colectomy. Karl joined SafeHeal in 2017 and leads SafeHeal into bringing the Colovac device to market and allowing patients to significantly improve their recovery from colorectal surgery. Karl has multiple family members who have been affected by cancer. Karl holds a PhD in Elementary Particle Physics from the University of Paris.
I was diagnosed with T1DM in 2002 at the end of my engineering studies. I soon discovered the difficult art of insulin management. Coming from an engineering background with a specialization in control theory, I realized that the tools I had studied and used as an engineer, could possibly be used to describe and analyze the glucose metabolism for deciding a better matched insulin dose to avoid excessive hypo- and hyperglycemia and for reducing the glucose variability. I decided to try this on my own data in my master thesis with interesting results. Later, I defended my PhD thesis on optimization of insulin management using smart mathematical algorithms to aid in the decision-making. This patent-pending technology formed the foundation for DIANOVATOR. Now, I’ve joined forces with like-minded partners and hope to contribute to making life with diabetes easier to manage, with fewer hypos, better time-in-range and just an overall improved quality of life with less anxiety about glucose levels and dosing decisions.
Harry is Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Cambridge Cancer Genomics. He leads CCG’s tech team of AI researchers, data scientists and bioinformaticians to conduct innovative R&D and develop underlying tumour analysis pipelines and cloud architecture of CCG’s smart genomics systems. Harry has a PhD in bioinformatics from Oxford University and experience in postdoctoral roles, including at Cambridge University with Cancer Research UK; and in the biopharma industry, where he worked on developing biomarker-based medical diagnostics. As a researcher at CRUK, Harry came to realise the disparity between cancer research and available care. This truly hit home when, in 2016, a close friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer at 21, with all standard treatment options exhausted. His greatest aim in the work he does now is to bring all the amazing new treatment ideas seen in research, into the clinic.
Philippe Halfon, MD, PhD, PharmD, is known as an opinion leader in virology. In 2001, he founded Genoscience Pharma, a biotech company. After his father passed away from a bladder cancer, he has committed to research in oncology. Today, the company is completing a phase 1b with a small molecule, GNS561, targeting the lysosomal compartment in cancer cells and cancer stem cells.
Beside Genoscience Pharma, Philippe has also created a medical laboratory, where he developed a molecular genetic platform dedicated to the screening of molecular and genetic mutations and aberrations to better evaluate prognosis in cancer patients.
Philippe is committed to shifting the cancer paradigm by developing new agents addressing a high unmet medical need. His strategy and innovation were recently acknowledged twice: Genoscience Pharma was awarded the Most Innovative Biotech SME in Healthcare in 2018 and was awarded a grant by Merck in the Biotech Advance Program.
Maria Zannes, President, Chief Executive Officer and Director of bioAffinity Technologies brings more than 30 years of executive experience in the medical and energy industries where she has built strong teams who meet ambitious goals. She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Earth Engineering Center Award from Columbia University where she co-founded two research centers. She began her career as a journalist and later worked as a Congressional aide before starting her business career. In 2005, Maria turned her focus to advancing scientific research that led to the development by bioAffinity Technologies of a novel test for early lung cancer as well as other cancer diagnostics and therapeutics. Maria’s mother, father, brother, uncle, and cousins have been diagnosed and treated for cancer including those of the lung, breast, blood, lymphatic system, skin, brain, and kidney. She is inspired by their lives and their courage. Maria received her J.D. from the University of Puget Sound in Washington State. She has two brilliant sons who are pursuing careers in physical therapy and medicine.
Hillary’s grandfather died of colon cancer because he’d never been screened for this preventable yet tragically common disease. Because of him, and because of her grandmother who is now fighting terminal colon cancer as well, Hillary became a physician and trained at Stanford and Columbia in internal medicine and oncology. She then founded GutSavvy because she recognized it was not enough to treat cancer once it’s already occurred – that the bulk of impact is in prevention. Over 40 million people in the U.S. alone miss their screening each year, due to fear, inconvenience, and lack of awareness. Alarmingly, colorectal cancer rates are also rising disproportionally in the young adult population. The GutSavvy team is dedicated to the mission of democratizing colon cancer screening to stop this disease which affects all of us and takes away too many of our loved ones.
Lonny Stormo is CEO and co-founder of POPS! Diabetes Care. After a thirty-year career at Medtronic, where he was honored to serve as an executive and business leader, Lonny resigned his position to lead POPS! Diabetes Care. Significant portions of Lonny’s career include business leadership and sales for both devices and data. He serves the community through positions in Rotary International and the American Diabetes Association. Lonny holds a BSEE degree from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and an MBA from Arizona State University.
Jason DaSilva is a director, producer, writer and disability rights activist best known for the Emmy Award winning documentary, When I Walk, the first film in a documentary trilogy. The documentary follows his diagnosis of primary progressive multiple sclerosis for seven years as he progresses from cane, to walker, to wheelchair. Following the success of When I Walk, Jason released the second film in the trilogy, When We Walk. When We Walk follows his life as he deals with his MS and fights to stay close with his son. The film is based on his New York Times Op-Ed article, Mapping the Disability Trap. In 2019, the film premiered at the Hot Docs Film Festival, won best documentary at the Center for Asian American Media’s CAAMFest, and had its New York debut at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. The final film, When They Walk, is currently in production. Jason DaSilva is also the President and Founder of AXS Lab, a nonprofit organization dedicated to giving a voice to people with disabilities through film, media and technology. As the President of AXS Lab, Jason is the key creative and strategic voice of the organization, providing insight to necessities in disability activism and facilitating AXS Lab’s work with the United Nations and partner organizations around the world. AXS Map, a crowd sourced Google map based platform which rates the accessibility of businesses, is the primary technology branch of AXS Lab, the largest online database in North America for accessibility. In 2015, Jason had the opportunity to share his AXS Map on a disability panel at the White House. AXS Map serves as an active tool for change alongside his films. AXS Lab contributed to the United Nation’s Flagship Report on Disability and Development which was published in 2018. In 2014, Jason won three awards: the American Association of Persons with Disabilities (AAPD) Paul G. Hearn Leadership Award, the New Mobility Magazine: Person of the Year Award, and the Christopher Award for Excellence in Film. In 2019 he was awarded the Top 40 Trailblazers Award from the Community Resource Exchange, an award for leaders who are driving meaningful change in their communities and the larger world, and the Made in New York recognition at the Gotham Awards.