Roundtable Discussion:
Moderator: Kenneth Bloom, M.D., FCAP | Chief Medical Officer, Advanced Pathology and Genomic Services, Invicro
Panelists: Eslie Dennis, M.D., MBChB, FCP (SA) | Senior Vice President, Chief Medical Officer and Head of North America Medical Affairs, Kyowa Kirin, Inc.
Michael D. Feldman, M.D., Ph.D. | Professor, Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, Vice Chair of Clinical Services, Medical Director Pathology Informatics, Director Tumor Tissue Bank, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
Phillip Kuo, M.D., Ph.D. | Senior Medical Director, Invicro
Precision medicine requires precision diagnostics. Understanding how to target a complex disease, such as cancer or diabetes, requires integration of many test results. Radiology, pathology and genomics are the major diagnostic disciplines, but despite their interdependence, there are few touch points today and the support for close collaboration has been limited. In this roundtable discussion, the speakers will explore the challenges of integrated diagnostics and provide insights on how to overcome them.
Dr. Bloom serves as the Chief Medical Officer for Advanced Pathology and Genomic Services at Invicro and Ambry Genetics, both Konica Minolta companies. Dr. Bloom brings more than 30 years of clinical and business experience in pathology, oncology, telemedicine and bioinformatics. His role is to expand, strengthen and commercialize the full-suite of precision medicine capabilities offered within the pathology and genomics markets for Invicro and Ambry Genetics.
Previously, Dr. Bloom was President and Head of Oncology & Immunotherapy for Human Longevity Inc., where his team developed and commercialized an industry leading cancer exome product and commercialized a technique for validating neoantigens predicted from sequencing. Dr. Bloom was also instrumental to the business strategy that evolved Clarient from a startup to the eventual acquisition by GE Healthcare.
Dr. Eslie Dennis is a physician with 10 years’ experience in clinical practice (internal medicine and hematology/oncology), 20+ years’ international experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, 2+ years leadership of public-private partnerships and laboratory research experience (immunology).
Dr. Dennis is currently SVP, Chief Medical Officer and Head of North America Medical Affairs for Kyowa Kirin, Inc. Previously, she was Vice President and Global Head of Medical Affairs at Roche Tissue Diagnostics, and prior roles include Executive Director of the Predictive Safety Testing Consortium and the Polycystic Kidney Disease Outcomes Consortium at the Critical Path Institute (C-Path), and Vice President and Medical Head Northeast for Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation.
Her industry experience includes building and leading medical teams, overseeing registration studies, pre-launch activities and post-marketing medical activities for both pharma and diagnostics organizations. Dr. Dennis' industry projects feature evidence generation, health economics and outcomes research, publications, medical information services, physician and pathologist training, medical education programs, drug safety activities and regulatory interactions.
Dr. Dennis received her MBChB from the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Harare, Zimbabwe and is a Fellow of the College of Physicians of South Africa. She received her internal medicine and hematology/oncology training at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa.
Dr. Feldman’s professional interests revolve around the development, integration and adoption of information technologies in the discipline of pathology. Dr. Feldman’s main areas of interest within this broad discipline is in the field of digital imaging. He has been studying pathology imaging on several fronts including interactions between pathology/radiology (radiopathogenomics of prostate cancer and breast carcinoma) and the development and utilization of computer assisted diagnostic algorithms for machine vision in prostate and breast cancer. More recently, Dr. Feldman has been developing deep learning methods for complex interrogation of pathology slides both within the cancer domain as well as in cardiovascular and renal pathology, methods to apply multispectral imaging for the analysis of multiplexed immunohistochemistry and immunofluorescence to tissues and a quantitative system for scoring and analyzing these studies at a cytometric level on surgical pathology slides. The efforts have been recognized by the national funding agencies of the NIH and DOD, as well as industry sponsored projects.
Dr. Kuo is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Radiology with a special certification in Nuclear Medicine. Prior to taking on the role of Senior Medical Director for Invicro, he was Chief of Nuclear Medicine for a university medical center for 10 years. Dr. Kuo has more than 100 publications and has served as principal investigator and co-principal investigator on multiple NIH grants and investigator-initiated trials.
Dr. Kuo’s experience includes design and supervision of phase I-III clinical trials including theranostics with PET, SPECT, MRI, and radiotherapeutics. Dr. Kuo’s experience also includes participation in USFDA and EMA meetings for regulatory approval. As a reader for clinical trials, he has reviewed greater than ten thousand scans for oncology or neurology.
Dr. Kuo received his A.B. from Harvard University, M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, completed his Internal Medicine Residency at UCLA Medical Center, Diagnostic Radiology Residency at Yale New Haven Hospital, and Nuclear Medicine Fellowship at Yale New Haven Hospital.