Bio
Prof. Dr.George A. Calin received both his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at Carol Davila University of Medicine in Bucharest, Romania. After working in cytogenetics as an undergraduate student with Dragos Stefanescu in Bucharest, Calin completed cancer genomics training in Massimo Negrini’s laboratory at the University of Ferrara, Italy, and in 2000, he became a postdoctoral fellow in Carlo Croce’s laboratory at Kimmel Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In June 2007, Calin joined MD Anderson as an associate professor in the Experimental Therapeutics department and was promoted to Professor with tenure in 2013. He explores new RNA therapeutic options for cancer patients and studies the roles of microRNAs and other non-coding RNAs in cancer initiation and progression, as well as the mechanisms of cancer predisposition.

Talk
A First-In-Class microRNA-Targeted Therapeutic Against Metastatic Cancers of Diverse Primary Disease Origins

Bio
Dr. Medarova is Chief Technology Officer at TransCode Therapeutics, Inc. Dr. Medarova carried out seminal work in the field of RNA oncology. Together with her colleagues at Harvard Medical School, she advanced research validating microRNAs as therapeutic targets and diagnostic biomarkers in cancer. Her work generated substantial interest in the research community since it illustrated the value of nanotechnology for delivering RNA therapy for oncology applications and described approaches for the noninvasive monitoring of RNA delivery. Since then, Dr. Medarova has emerged as one of the leaders in the field of non-coding RNA delivery to cancer. She has developed a robust NIH-funded program and authored multiple high-impact publications on the topic of RNA delivery, nanotechnology, and the biology of cancer metastasis. Dr. Medarova obtained a B.A. in pre-medicine from the University of Southern Maine and a Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of New Hampshire.