Genetics and Molecular Biology Conference | GMBSUMMIT2025 | Top Conference in Genetic

Prof. Manuel Perucho

Sanford-Burnham-Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, USA

Title: The crosstalk between genetics and epigenetics in colorectal cancer pathogenesis

Manuel Perucho earned his Ph.D. in biological sciences at the University of Madrid, Spain in 1976. He did postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck-Institut, Berlin, and at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Following appointments at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook, Long Island, New York, as Assistant and Associate Professor in 1982 and 1987, respectively, Dr. Perucho joined the California Institute for Biological Research (CIBR) in La Jolla, California, serving as Research Program Director from 1988 to 1995. Dr. Perucho was recruited to the Burnham Institute for Medical Research, La Jolla, California, in 1995 where he was Program Director and Co-Director until 2010. From 2009-2019 he was Director of the Institute of Predictive and Personalized Medicine of Cancer (IMPPC), Barcelona, Spain. Currently he holds a position of Professor Emeritus at the Sanford Burnham Prebys (SBP) Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, California. Dr. Perucho was the recipient of several awards and honors, including a Merit Award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (1994-2010); the 2003 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Professorship in Basic Cancer Research; Doctor Honoris Causa by the Pablo de Olavide University of Seville (2005). His research projects funded by the NIH (1982-2010) exceeded $20 million. He was principal investigator of Spanish research projects (2009-2019) worth over 7 million euros. He has published over 200 papers with more than 26,000 citations, with and H-index of 61 as of October 2024. https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=nDMyCpcAAAAJ&view_op=list_works Dr. Perucho has a long-lasting interest in the molecular genetics of malignancy. Dr. Perucho's work made seminal contributions in the identification, isolation and characterization of the human RAS oncogenes in the early eighties. Subsequently, his work opened a new field of cancer research by discovering in the early nineties microsatellite instability (MSI). MSI is a landmark of the "mutator" phenotype, underlying various sporadic and hereditary cancers, in particular, the hereditary non-polyposis colorectal cancer (HNPCC) or Lynch Syndrome. MSI delineated a different pathway followed by a sub-fraction of colorectal cancers (CRC) that offered new avenues for the diagnosis of cancer predisposition in hereditary cases that are currently used in the clinical practice worldwide. Later, it became evident that epigenetic alterations were also germane to CRC pathogenesis, and Dr. Perucho showed that these epigenetic alterations (both hypermethylation and hypomethylation) preceded and influenced the generation of genetic oncogenic changes, which in turn superseded the epigenetic alterations that drove tumorigenesis. The dissection of these genetic and epigenetic somatic alterations has helped our understanding of the pathways stratifying CRC at the molecular level. More recently Dr. Perucho efforts focused on the connection between aging and cancer due to the accumulation of epigenetic alterations. Thus, demethylation of repetitive sequences at pericentromeric regions have a causal link with the onset of tetraploidy in CRC.

Prof. Kerstin Lindblad-Toh

Uppsala University, Sweden

Title: Using evolutionary constraint to understand disease and cancer

Dr Kerstin Lindblad-Toh is a professor of comparative genomics at Uppsala University Sweden and Scientific Director of Vertebrate Genomics at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Her research focuses on mammalian comparative genomics, canine and human disease genetics and cancer. She has published >250 articles including 11 papers in Science on the Zoonomia project in 2023. The Zoonomia project encompassed the analysis of 240 mammals to understand genome evolution and to dissect the genetic underpinnings of disease. Professor Lindblad-Toh is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences.

Prof. Ralf Schnabel

Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany

Title: A combinatorial code modifies a ground state for spindle orientation to organise the early C. elegans embryo

Will update soon

Prof. Erich Bornberg-Bauer

The University of Münster, Germany

Title: De novo proteins - now you see them, now you don't

Will update.

Prof. Bernd Kaina

University Medical Center, Germany

Title: DNA repair, senescence and senotherapeutics in cancer therapy

Dr. Bernd Kaina, Professor of Toxicology at the University Medical Center in Mainz, Germany, holds a doctoral degree from the University of Halle and worked as a postdoc and group leader at various institutions, including the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. In 1993, he was appointed head of the Division of Molecular and Applied Toxicology at the Institute of Toxicology of the University of Mainz, and from 2004 to 2018 he served as group leader and director of this institute at the Medical Center in Mainz. His field of work includes the effects of environmental carcinogens as well as anticancer drugs on cancer cells, the molecular mechanisms of cell death, cellular senescence, mutagenesis and carcinogenesis with special emphasis on DNA repair and DNA damage signaling. He published more than 400 papers in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters.

Prof. Temple Smith

Boston University, USA

Title: Will update soon.

Will update soon.

Prof. Wen-Hui Shen

CNRS, France

Title: Will update soon.

Will update soon.

Prof. Wen-Hsiung Li

Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Title: What genetic changes make humans so conspicuosly different from chimpanzees in morphology and behaviour?

Wen-Hsiung Li is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and James D. Watson Chair Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. Li received his PhD in applied mathematics from Brown University but has been pursuing genetics and evolutionary studies since his PhD stduy. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA (2003-). He received the 2003 Balzan Prize for Genetics and Evolution 2003, the Mendel lecture and medal 2009, and the Presidential Science award 2023, Taiwan. He was President of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution in 2000. His research interests include genomics, genetics, molecular and genomic evolution, methods for DNA sequence and genomic data analysis, computational biology and synthetic biology. His works have been cited more than 88,000 times with an H-index of 122, according to Google Scholar.

Prof. Zsuzsanna Izsvák

Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Society, Germany

Title: Transposable elements: ”junk” or “treasure”

Zsuzsanna Izsvák (ZI) earned her PhD in 1994 from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Following her doctoral studies, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Minnesota and subsequently joined the Netherlands Cancer Institute as an EMBO fellow. In 1999, she became a researcher at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, where she has been a driving force in molecular biology ever since.

In 2004, her innovative research received strategic support from the European Science Foundation in the form of a Young Investigator Award (EURYI). This recognition enabled her to establish the “Mobile DNA Laboratory” in Berlin, which she continues to lead. Her contributions to science were further celebrated in 2009 when her work was recognized with the prestigious "Molecule of the Year" award. She also earned the title of Doctor of Science (DSc) and was elected a foreign member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. From 2009 to 2011, she served as a guest professor at the Medical University of Debrecen in Hungary. She currently serves as the president of the Dennis Gabor Gesellschaft.

In 2012, ZI's groundbreaking research secured funding from the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant) for her project TransposoSTRESS. From 2016, she has been a co-Principal Investigator on a second ERC Advanced Grant, EvoGenMed. That same year, she co-founded the Helmholtz Innovation Lab (MDCell), and her lab was recently selected to participate in the EFRE (European Regional Development Fund) program.

As a pioneer in the study of transposable elements (TEs) in vertebrates, ZI is one of the inventors of the Sleeping Beauty transposon-based non-viral vector system, a breakthrough in gene therapy. Her research has significantly advanced our understanding of the physiological functions of TEs in early human development. Notably, her lab discovered that the ancient endogenous retrovirus HERVH, inactivated roughly 30 million years ago, plays a key role in the regulatory network of pluripotency in primates and humans. These findings uncovered novel, primate-specific transcriptional circuits critical to early human development. Additionally, her team demonstrated the domesticated function of the PiggyBac transposon-derived 1 (PGBD1) gene, which contributes to neuronal homeostasis in humans.

Together with collaborators from the University of Bath and the MRC in the UK, ZI co-authored the Unwanted Genome Hypothesis, positing that many diseases stem from misregulation of the non-coding genome or the failure to properly filter genomic noise. Currently, her lab focuses on unraveling the principles of the human non-coding genome, with particular attention to the roles of TE activity in disease mechanisms and broader genomic functions.

Her research aims to bridge fundamental scientific discoveries with practical applications, developing a technology platform encompassing decoding of the non-coding genome, stem cell research, gene and cell therapy, transgenesis, cancer research, and functional genomics.

Prof. Rony Seger

Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel

Title: The nuclear translocation of ERK as a therapeutic target for cancer

Prof. Rony Seger became a group leader in the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1994, promoted to full professor full professor in 2007, and was the head of the department of Biological Regulation (2011-2017). His research group is interested in MAPK and AKT signaling and in particular in the subcellular localization of their components. Recently, the group elucidated the distinct mechanisms of nuclear translocation of ERK and p38/JNK, which are used as anti-cancer and inflammation targets. Dr. Seger published more than 240 papers, supervised more than 80 research students and post-docs, served in the editorial board of several journals and received many prizes and awards.

Plenary Speakers