Amy LeBlanc, DVM, DACVIM

TeamLab: Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Dr. Amy LeBlanc is a board-certified veterinary oncologist, Senior Scientist and the Director of the intramural NCI’s Comparative Oncology Program. In this position she conducts preclinical mouse and translational pet dog studies that are designed to inform the drug and imaging agent development path for human cancer patients, specifically those with osteosarcoma. She directly oversees the NCI Comparative Oncology Trials Consortium (COTC), which provides infrastructure necessary to connect participating veterinary academic institutions with stakeholders in drug development to execute fit-for-purpose comparative clinical trials in novel therapeutics and imaging agents. Her program provides support to several extramural NCI-funded initiatives including the Integrated Canine Data Commons and Cancer Moonshot-funded canine immunotherapeutic clinical trials conducted under the PRECINCT network. Dr. LeBlanc is a recipient of a 2023 NCI Director’s award for translational science as well as the 2024 Daniel E. Salmon award from the National Association of Federal Veterinarians.

Andy Livingston, MD MS

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
TeamLab: Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Andy Livingston, MD MS is a medical oncologist and clinical investigator specializing in the care of teens and young adults with sarcoma. He completed medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch and went on to complete combined residency training in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at Duke University. He completed fellowship training in Hematology and Medical Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center where he served as Chief Fellow. He is an Associate Professor of Sarcoma Medical Oncology, holds a joint appointment in Pediatrics, and serves as Co-Director for the Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) Oncology Program at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Dr. Livingston’s clinical and translational research is focused on understanding primary immune and genomic mechanisms of resistance to immunotherapy in osteosarcoma and devising next-generation immunotherapy approaches for patients with relapsed/metastatic disease. He is an experienced clinical trialist leading early phase sarcoma clinical trials spanning the pediatrics to adult patient population, advancing novel therapies in the sarcoma clinic.

Brian Crompton, MD

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
TeamLab: Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Brian Crompton, MD is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a Pediatric Oncologist at the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. He is the principal investigator of a translational research laboratory focused on utilizing genomic technologies to identify and validate new non-invasive biomarkers of treatment response and resistance in pediatric solid tumors. His laboratory utilizes innovative next-generation sequencing technologies to detect, quantify, and profile circulating tumor DNA and circulating tumor cells in patients with pediatric solid tumors. These liquid biopsy approaches help track how patients are responding to therapy, identify how tumors evolve over time to give rise to cancer relapses, and can be used as non-invasive diagnostic tests for children with cancer predisposition syndromes.

Dr. Crompton is a practicing physician at the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. His inpatient service time focuses is on providing subspecialty care for patients with pediatric solid tumor malignancies. In the outpatient setting, he cares for children with known and suspected inherited cancer risk syndromes, prescribing cancer screening regimens aimed at identifying cancer early to improve outcomes for these patients. He is also co-leading the development of a clinical liquid biopsy assay for pediatric solid tumors, working directly with the BCH Laboratory for Molecular Pediatric Pathology (LaMPP) and the Broad Institute’s Clinical Research Sequencing Platform (CRSP).

Dr. Crompton is the co-leader for research for the pediatric solid tumor program at DF/BCCBDC. He has multiple national leadership roles including the faculty lead for the Childhood Sarcoma Biostatistics and Annotation Office at the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) and as a steering committee member of the COG Bone Tumor and Soft-tissue Sarcoma disease groups. He is the co-founder and co-leader of the Early Detection in SYNdromic Cancers (EDISYN) consortium comprised of leading institutions in the United States studying early cancer detection strategies for the care of patients with Li-Fraumeni Syndrome and other cancer predisposition syndromes.

Brian Ladle, MD, PhD

The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Brian Ladle, MD, PhD is a pediatric oncologist, sarcoma specialist, and immunotherapy researcher at Johns Hopkins University. He earned his MD and PhD degrees at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and then completed his residency in pediatrics at Cincinnati Childrenís Hospital followed by a pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at the combined Johns Hopkins/National Cancer Institute program. His research centers around the goal of generating potent immune responses against pediatric sarcoma tumors with a specific emphasis on osteosarcoma. Ongoing projects encompass preclinical work using osteosarcoma mouse models, studying osteosarcoma that arises in dog, and osteosarcoma clinical trials in both dogs and humans.

Brian Mooney, PhD

BC Cancer Research Institute
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Brian Mooney, PhD, completed his undergraduate training in Biochemistry in University College Dublin, Ireland. He held a prestigious Irish Cancer Society Research scholarship which supported his PhD at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Following his PhD, he begun his postdoctoral training with Dr. Gregg Morin and Dr. Poul Sorensen at the BC Cancer Research Institute, Vancouver, Canada. His primary research interests includes identifying new surface proteins that could be targeted by immunotherapy. His research was supported by a Michael Smith Health Research BC Research Fellowship, which he was awarded in 2023 to research new surface proteins as immunotherapy targets in osteosarcoma.

Brooke Howitt, MD

Stanford Medicine
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Brooke E. Howitt, MD, is an Associate Professor in the Pathology Department and the Irene Adler Endowed Scholar at Stanford University. She received a BA in Biology from Washington University in St. Louis and then obtained her medical degree from Stanford University. Dr. Howitt then completed an Anatomic Pathology residency and the Women’s and Perinatal Pathology Fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital where she subsequently was hired as faculty. Dr. Howitt joined the faculty at Stanford in 2017 as a gynecologic and sarcoma pathologist. She has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles and numerous book chapters. Dr. Howitt has served as a member-at-large on the Board of Directors for the International Society of Gynecological Pathologists, currently serves as an Associate Editor for Modern Pathology, and is on the editorial boards of International Journal of Gynecologic Pathology, and Human Pathology. Her research interests focus on gynecologic and mesenchymal neoplasms and their precursor lesions aiming to better understand morphologic and molecular alterations associated with clinical relevance.

Cheryl London, DVM, PhD, DACVIM

Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Dr. London is the Anne Engen and Dusty Professor of Comparative Oncology at the Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and a veterinary medical oncologist with over 25 years of experience in translational and comparative oncology and drug development. She is also the Associate Dean for Research and Director of the Clinical Research Shared Resource at the Cummings School, which oversees studies in client owned animals with spontaneous disease. Dr. London has ongoing collaborations with the UMass Chan Medical School, Tufts Medical Center, MIT and Vanderbilt Medical School as well as several projects with industry partners. She holds a joint appointment with the Tufts Clinical Translational Science Institute where she directs the Research Collaboration Team and leads the High Impact Specialized Innovation Program. Dr. London earned her DVM at the Cummings School, completed her Residency in Medical Oncology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and received her PhD in Immunology at Harvard University. Prior to joining Tufts University, Dr. London was an Assistant Professor at the UC Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine, and then the Shackelford Professor of Comparative Oncology at The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine

Christina Curtis, PhD, MSc

Stanford Medicine
TeamLab(s): Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab, The Data Science Hub

Christine Pratilas, MD

The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Dr. Christine Pratilas is a pediatric oncologist and research scientist at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She joined the Hopkins pediatric sarcoma team in 2014, after completing her fellowship and spending the early years of her career at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Dr. Pratilas’ clinical expertise is in the management of children, adolescents and young adults with sarcomas, with research interests in rhabdomyosarcoma and MPNST. In addition, she sees children with kidney cancers; melanocytic neoplasms and melanoma; children with NF1-associated non-CNS neoplasms; and other rare pediatric cancers. She is an investigator on multiple clinical trials of molecularly targeted therapies in children.

She has a strong interest in pediatric cancer genetics, and together with the Clinical Genetics service and the Comprehensive Neurofibromatosis Center at JH, provides care for children with Li-Fraumeni syndrome, neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), RAS-opathies, and other cancer predisposition syndromes.

Damon Reed, MD

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Damon Reed, MD, is the Head of the Solid Tumor Division in MSK Kids overseeing the Sarcoma, Neuroblastoma, and Rare Tumors Programs. He is also appointed in the Medical Oncology Department and cares for young adults with Sarcoma. After 15 years at Moffitt Cancer Center, in 2023 Dr. Reed moved to Memorial Sloan Kettering to translate evolutionary therapies to first line therapy for metastatic sarcomas enriched in state of the art correlative science to collaborate with basic science researchers and better understand primary chemotherapy resistance.

As an evolutionary oncologist, Dr. Reed focuses on translating agents, combinations, and strategies for pediatric, adolescent, and young adult sarcoma patients through preclinical testing and clinical trials. Primarily, he wishes to develop a trial framework that allows more robust measures of perturbation of tumors and anticipates how cancers resist and evolve in response to therapies. Conceptually, Dr. Reed thinks of evolutionary oncology as precision medicine over time incorporating and understanding of heterogeneity and natural selection from therapies, and thus aspires to anticipate tumor adaptation to each systemic therapy he applies.

Dr. Reed is a team scientist. As the Vice Chair of the Bone Tumor Committee at the Children’s Oncology Group, he has the opportunity to shape major phase 2 and 3 trials through the cooperative group and across the NCTN. Recent investigator-initiated trials that he developed include an evolutionary inspired protocol for metastatic, fusion positive rhabdomyosarcomas (NCT04388839), and multiple Phase 2 and Phase 1 studies. As the former Leader of the National Pediatric Cancer Foundation’s Sunshine Project, Dr. Reed helped grow this multi-institutional network that conducts innovative, correlative biology rich trials safely from 6 to over 20 institutions.

Daniel Zhang, BS

The UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center
TeamLab: Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Daniel Zhang is an MD/PhD candidate in Biomedical Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, through the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP). He conducts his doctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Alejandro Sweet-Cordero, investigating ploidy-dependent vulnerabilities in osteosarcoma to identify new therapeutic strategies for pediatric cancers. His work integrates patient-derived xenograft models and genome-wide CRISPRi screening to uncover genetic dependencies unique to whole-genome duplicated tumors. Daniel earned his Bachelor of Science in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a minor in Comparative Media Studies. As an undergraduate researcher in Dr. Tyler Jacks’ laboratory at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, he led the development of an autochthonous mouse model of metastatic colorectal cancer compatible with in vivo CRISPR/Cas9 editing and contributed to studies examining tumor-immune interactions and cancer driver gene function. This work resulted in co-author publications in Nature Genetics and Nature Cancer and an invited mini-symposium presentation at the American Association for Cancer Research. Daniel was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology in the Netherlands, where he developed organoid-based models to study immune-tumor interactions in pediatric cancers. His research accomplishments have been recognized with honors, including the Fulbright-Netherlands America Foundation Pediatric Cancer Award, the AACR Undergraduate Scholar Award, and the Whitehead Prize in Biology. Through his work, Daniel aims to bridge fundamental cancer biology with translational impact for pediatric malignancies with unmet clinical need.

E. Alejandro Sweet-Cordero, MD

The UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Dr. Sweet-Cordero is a cancer biologist and practicing pediatric oncologist focused on basic and translational cancer research. He is a Benioff Professor of Children’s Health at UCSF and serves as the chief of the division of pediatric oncology at Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland. His laboratory focuses on pediatric sarcoma and lung cancer research. The lab’s osteosarcoma work is focused on defining mechanisms driving metastatic progression and therapy resistance. He has extensive expertise in integrative genomic analysis (WGS, RNAseq, ATACseq) and functional genomic studies using CRISPR/CAS9 as well as lineage tracing studies applied to studying osteosarcoma. His lab is participating in the efforts of Team Defiant to change the standard of care for osteosarcoma.

Fernanda Martins Rodrigues, MSc, PhD

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
TeamLab(s): Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab, Data Science Hub

Originally from Brazil, Fernanda Martins Rodrigues, MSc, PhD, is a Computational Biologist II at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she works with Dr. Andrew McPherson and Dr. Jovana Pavisic. Before joining MSK, she was a postdoctoral research scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, where she also earned her PhD in Molecular Genetics and Genomics. Her research interests center on using large-scale genomic and multi-omic data to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying cancer predisposition, development, and progression. Throughout her career, Fernanda has contributed to several major cancer research consortia, including TCGA, HTAN, CPTAC, PE-CGS, MMRF, and PDXNet, and has developed expertise in germline and somatic variant analysis, rare variant interpretation, and multi-omic data integration. At MSK, her current research focuses on integrating genomic, transcriptomic, and other molecular data to better understand the biology, evolution, and clinical heterogeneity of pediatric osteosarcoma. She is excited to contribute to the Break Through Cancer community and to collaborate across disciplines to advance precision cancer research and improve outcomes for patients.

Filemon Dela Cruz, MD

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Filemon Dela Cruz, MD is a pediatric oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center with clinical and research interests in pediatric bone tumors including Osteosarcoma. He obtained his medical degree at UC Davis and residency training at UC San Francisco before venturing to the East coast to complete his fellowship training at Columbia University Medical Center. He has worked to develop patient-derived xenograft (PDX) mouse tumor models of osteosarcoma and other pediatric cancers as novel tools to study cancer biology and to evaluate the clinical potential of drugs for use in pediatric cancer. He is involved in national efforts to help prioritize drugs for pediatric cancer as a member of the NCI PIVOT (Pediatric In VivO Testing) program and has led the development of PROXC (Pediatric Research in Oncology Xenografting Consortium) which has assembled one of the largest federated collection of pediatric PDXs.

James Morrow, MD, PhD

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

James Morrow, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Morrow received his bachelor’s degree with highest honors in biology from The Pennsylvania State University. He obtained his MD and PhD degrees from Case Western Reserve University. His PhD work focused on enhancer dysregulation in osteosarcoma metastasis under the co-supervision of Peter Scacheri at Case Western and Chand Khanna at NCI. He completed his clinical training in pediatrics and pediatric oncology at Dana-Farber and Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr. Morrow is currently an attending physician in Pediatric Oncology and an Instructor in the lab of Bradley Bernstein in the Cancer Biology Department of Dana-Farber. Dr. Morrow’s research focuses on the developmental origins and evolution of osteosarcoma. Dr. Morrow is the recipient of a Damon Runyon-St. Jude Pediatric Cancer Research Fellowship, an Alex’s Lemonade State Foundation Young Investigator Award, and a Rally Foundation Outside the Box Award.

Jonathan Gill, MD

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
TeamLab(s): Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Jonathan Gill, MD is a pediatric oncologist at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center with a focus on osteosarcoma. He has been a member of the Gorlick Laboratory which focuses on preclinical drug development in osteosarcoma since 2009. Dr. Gill received his bachelor’s degree magna cum laude from Harvard University and his MD from UCLA School of Medicine. Since joining MD Anderson in 2017, he has served as the Director of Clinical and Translational Research in Pediatrics.

Jovana Pavisic, MD

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab
The Data Science Hub

Dr. Pavisic, MD is an Assistant Attending on the Sarcoma Service and Pediatric Translational Medicine Program in the Department of Pediatrics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She earned her MD from Yale University, completed pediatrics residency at Stanford Children’s Hospital, and fellowship in pediatric hematology/oncology at Columbia, where she also completed a NLM-funded postdoctoral fellowship and masters program in Biomedical Informatics. She has expertise in bioinformatics, machine learning, and computational genomics. Her research focuses on leveraging novel computational approaches to study multi-omic data in pediatric oncology to better understand tumor biology, identify new therapeutic targets, and transform the role for precision oncology in pediatrics. Specifically, she has focused on regulatory network analysis of transcriptomic data for identification of tumor dependencies, biomarker development, and elucidation of drug mechanism of action to guide therapy selection across high-risk pediatric cancers. She has extended these approaches to single-cell technologies to characterize regulatory drivers of tumor heterogeneity and cell state-specific therapeutic vulnerabilities to advance targeted combination therapy approaches for high-risk pediatric tumors. Her clinical expertise is in treating children with sarcoma, with a focus on using tumor biology and molecular characterization to drive treatment.

Katherine A. Janeway, MD, MMSc, FASCO

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Dr. Janeway received her MD and a Masters of Medical Science from Harvard Medical School. She completed her pediatrics residency and her Pediatric Hematology-Oncology fellowship in Boston at Boston Children’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where she was Chief Resident and Chief Fellow. She is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and a Senior Physician who cares for young people with sarcoma and she is Director of Clinical Genomics at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Janeway’s research is focused on genomics, precision oncology, and bone sarcomas.

She leads clinical trials in osteosarcoma and Ewing sarcoma both as an independent investigator and as the Chair of the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) Bone Tumor Committee. The Janeway Laboratory has uncovered the genomic events causing and sustaining difficult-to-treat childhood solid malignancies. The laboratory leads several studies, which have enrolled and sequenced more than 2,500 patients with childhood cancers. They are using this data to deepen the understanding of clinical and genomic factors explaining prognosis and treatment response and resistance with a focus on sarcomas. In collaboration with the Broad Institute and Count Me In, the group is innovating patient partnerships in sarcoma research.

Matthew S. Blacksmith, PhD

Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University
TeamLab: Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Matthew S. Blacksmith, PhD, is a bioinformatics technician in the lab of Dr. Heather Gardner at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan under the mentorship of Drs. Jeffrey M. Kidd and John V. Moran where he queried the landscape and rate of accumulation of retrotransposon derived insertions in canine genomes. A recent addition to the Gardner lab, Dr. Blacksmith intends to apply his background in canine genetics and bioinformatics to enable cross-species translational analysis of multi-omic osteosarcoma datasets.

Michael Lizardo, PhD

BC Cancer Research Institute
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Michael Lizardo, PhD is a staff scientist in the Poul Sorensen group in the Department of Molecular Oncology, BC Cancer, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Dr. Lizardo received his PhD in Medical Biophysics from Western University in London, ON, Canada where he specialized in metastasis models in cancer under the mentorship of Drs. Ann F. Chambers and Ian C. MacDonald. He went on to perform post-doctoral studies in the role of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress in metastatic osteosarcoma (OS) under the mentorship of Dr. Chand Khanna in the Pediatric Oncology Branch at the National Cancer Institute/National Institutes of Health. Dr. Lizardo continues his research in stress adaptation pathways in metastatic OS at BC Cancer.

Mina Pichavant, MSc, MBA

Stanford Medicine
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Mina Pichavant, MSc, MBA has over a decade of experience managing large-scale NIH consortium grants. She currently serves as Associate Director of the Stanford Human Immune Monitoring Center and has led project management for the U24 Cancer Immune Monitoring and Analysis Center (CIMAC), the U54 Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) center, and the Accelerating Medicines Partnership in Rheumatoid Arthritis and Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (AMP RA/SLE). Mina brings deep expertise in strategic planning, regulatory compliance, and cross-institutional collaboration, with a proven track record of advancing complex clinical and translational research programs.

Nicolas J. Llosa, MD

The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins
TeamLab(s): Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Poul Sorensen, MD, PhD

BC Cancer Research Institute

Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Dr. Poul Sorensen is a molecular pathologist and internationally renowned expert in childhood cancers, specializing in the biology and genetics of high-risk solid tumors in children and young adults. Dr. Sorensen’s laboratory, located at the BC Cancer Research Centre in Vancouver, Canada, where he is a Distinguished Scientist, focuses on using both genetic approaches (such as NGS) and biochemical methods (e.g. proteomics) to identify deregulated signaling cascades in childhood cancer cells. His group has discovered many novel translocation associated alterations in childhood cancer, including the EWS-ERG fusion in Ewing sarcoma and the ETV6-NTRK3 fusion in infantile sarcomas and secretory breast carcinoma. In fact, his discovery of ETV6-NTRK3 is the first description of NTRK fusions as recurrent drivers in human tumors, now thought to occur in >25 different human tumor types and in ~1% of human malignancies, leading to the development and world-wide approval of NTRK inhibitors for clinical use. Dr. Sorensen and his team have also successfully characterized the surfaceome of several pediatric solid cancers, leading to the identification of promising therapeutic targets and development of several immunotherapeutic approaches.

Riaz Gillani, MD

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Dr. Riaz Gillani is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and an Attending Physician in Pediatric Hematology/ Oncology at the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. He grew up in Fredericksburg, Virginia and subsequently studied biomedical engineering at Brown University. He completed medical school at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, pediatrics residency in the Boston Combined Residency Program, and pediatric hematology/ oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital. As a post-doctoral researcher, he trained under the mentorship of Dr. Eliezer Van Allen and Dr. Katie Janeway, publishing research on somatic structural variants in oncogenesis and germline risk factors in pediatric solid tumors. Clinically, Dr. Gillani cares for pediatric patients with solid tumors and hematologic malignancies. He holds appointments and affiliations at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Broad Institute.

Richard Gorlick, MD

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Richard Gorlick, MD, is chair and division head of Pediatrics at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. An internationally recognized physician-scientist in the fields of pediatric oncology and hematology, he came to MD Anderson in December 2016 from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, where he was professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Pharmacology. He also was division chief of Pediatric Hematology-Oncology and vice chairman of Pediatrics at The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore.

A pediatric cancer survivor himself, Dr. Gorlick has committed his life’s work to helping young patients with cancer and their families. For more than two decades, his research and clinical efforts have focused on sarcomas—tumors that grow in connective tissues, including bones, muscles, tendons, and cartilage. His laboratory works to identify targeted therapies and new drug uses for childhood cancers as well as to understand the mechanisms behind the development and progression of osteosarcoma, the most common form of pediatric bone cancer.

Early in his career, Dr. Gorlick recognized that limited availability of tumor samples precluded translational research in the sarcoma field. As a response to the problem, his lab became the founding Bone Tumor Resource Laboratory for the study of this disease. This banking effort grew into the world’s largest osteosarcoma tissue bank.

Dr. Gorlick received his medical degree from the State University of New York Downstate College of Medicine. He completed his training at New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is chair of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Pediatric and Adolescent Solid Tumor Steering Committee (PAST SC). Dr. Gorlick has also served on the NCI Preclinical Testing Consortium (now known as the Pediatric Preclinical In Vivo Testing – PIVOT) and is past president of the Connective Tissue Oncology Society.

Dr. Gorlick’s recent honors include the 2024 ASCO Pediatric Oncology Award and induction into the 2025 Giants of Cancer Care, both recognizing his significant contributions to pediatric oncology. Recently, he was also awarded a ~$5 million dollar Multi-Investigator Research Award (MIRA) by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). This Pediatric Osteosarcoma Research Program develops new targeted therapies and immunotherapies to improve outcomes for young patients, enhancing MD Anderson’s leadership in innovative cancer care and research.

Recently, Dr. Gorlick was awarded more than $5 million by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas to develop a pediatric-focused solid tumor bank. This resource will provide an opportunity for MD Anderson oncologists to study DNA architecture within a tumor and immune response to pediatric cancers.

Suzanne J. Forrest, MD

Dana-Farber Cancer Center
TeamLab:  Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Dr. Suzanne Forrest is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an Attending Physician in the Department of Hematology/Oncology at Dana Farber/Boston Children’s Hospital Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. She received her MD from Yale University School of Medicine. She completed her pediatrics residency in the Boston Combined Residency Program, and she completed her Pediatric Hematology/Oncology fellowship at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital, where she also completed a one-year Early Oncology Drug Development Fellowship Program as part of a partnership between Novartis and Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Hospital. Her research is focused on developing novel clinical trials that leverage cancer genomics to inform treatment strategies for pediatric solid tumors and improve outcomes for children and adolescents with cancer. To date, Dr. Forrest has initiated two multicenter trials in advanced solid tumors, including a clinical trial she led with Dr. Janeway in recurrent osteosarcoma.

Toby Barrack, MD, MBA

Stanford Medicine
TeamLab(s): Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Dr. Toby N. Barrack, MD, MBA, is a highly effective physician-scientist and entrepreneur whose academic and research endeavors are rooted in orthopedic surgery, particularly the field of arthroplasty. He completed his medical education at Washington University in St. Louis and received an Accelerated MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business. His clinical training includes an Orthopedic Surgery Residency at Stanford University. Dr. Barrack’s extensive research, often conducted at the Total Joint Research Center at Washington University School of Medicine, has yielded numerous peer-reviewed publications and presentations that address challenging issues in hip and knee replacement. His work has investigated the effect of surgical techniques, characterized the frequency of noise generation in modern knee arthroplasty, and analyzed the utility of routine follow-up after primary arthroplasty.

Dr. Barrack has combined his clinical and business acumen to found and co-found several ventures, including his role as Co-Founder and CEO of Luci, a company focused on improving access to and affordability of diagnostic imaging. Previously, he served as Chief Operating Officer of 3Helix, where he was instrumental in co-leading venture and angel fundraising efforts and achieving a 2X valuation step-up through strategic analysis. He is also a significant figure in the venture capital space, serving as a Venture Partner at Erez Capital and a Venture Associate and Founding Member of the Physician Advisory Board for firms such as OCA Ventures and ATOMS VC. Dr. Barrack’s contributions have been recognized with honors, including the Deans Fellowship Recipient from Washington University School of Medicine and the OREF/Current Concepts in Joint Replacement Clinical Practice Award.

Wendy B London, PhD

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
TeamLab: Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Dr. London is Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, Director of Biostatistics in the Division of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital, Director of the Survey and Qualitative Methods Core, Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, and Chair, Statistics Committee of the International Neuroblastoma Risk Groups (INRG). She was awarded her PhD in Biostatistics from Virginia Commonwealth University, Medical College of Virginia, in 1997. She has >25 years of experience in design, conduct, analysis, and reporting of clinical trials and biological studies in pediatric cancer. Dr. London is on the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) Neuroblastoma Steering Committee, and was Lead Statistician (1998-2014
Dr. London’s research focuses on the identification of prognostic biomarkers in neuroblastoma, and applying them to create and improve risk stratification for the assignment of treatment intensity for children with neuroblastoma.
Dr. London is a member of the Cellular, Tissue, and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee of the FDA (2023-27) and NIH/NCI Therapeutic Immune Regulation (TIR) Study Section (2022-26). She served on NIH/NCI Clinical Oncology Study Section (2006-10), NIH/NCI Immunotherapy Study Section (2022-23), and ASCO program committee (2014-16). She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (2020-present), and was on Journal of Clinical Oncology editorial board (2013-2020). She has been a faculty member of the AACR/ASCO Methods in Clinical Cancer Research Workshop since 2011, currently a workshop co-chair (2024-26).

Yutaro Tanaka

Dana-Farber Cancer Center
TeamLab: Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab

Yutaro Tanaka is a Computational Biologist in the Gillani Lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics from Columbia University. Yutaro’s research currently focuses on leveraging large-scale, patient derived “omics” datasets to better characterize the molecular mechanisms driving metastatic disease and treatment resistance in Osteosarcoma and other pediatric solid tumors.