Events / Creating a System for Pediatric Precision Cancer Medicine
Elaine Mardis

Creating a System for Pediatric Precision Cancer Medicine

September 24, 2018
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Speaker:
Elaine R Mardis, Ph.D.
Nationwide Foundation Endowed Chair in Genomic Medicine
Co-Executive Director, Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital
Professor of Pediatrics, The Ohio State University College of Medicine

Elaine Mardis, PhD is co-Executive Director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Nationwide Foundation Endowed Chair of Genomic Medicine. She also is Professor of Pediatrics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. Dr. Mardis joined Nationwide Children’s Hospital in 2016. Educated at the University of Oklahoma with a B.S. in Zoology and a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Biochemistry, Dr. Mardis did postgraduate work in industry at BioRad Laboratories. She was a member of the faculty of Washington University School of Medicine from 1993-2016.

Dr. Mardis has authored over 350 articles in prestigious peer-reviewed journals and has written book chapters for several medical textbooks. She serves as an associate editor for three peer-reviewed journals (Disease Models and Mechanisms, Molecular Cancer Research, and Annals of Oncology) and is Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Case Studies, published by Cold Spring Harbor Press. Dr. Mardis has given lectures at scientific meetings worldwide and was awarded the Morton K Schwartz award from the American Association for Clinical Chemistry in 2016. She has been listed since 2013 as one of the most highly cited researchers in the world by Thompson Reuters. Dr. Mardis has been a member of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) since 2007, was the program committee chair for the 2018 AACR Annual Meeting and is the AACR President-elect.

Abstract:
Genomics-based discoveries have revealed the underpinnings of pediatric cancer over the past ten years of study. These findings stand in stark contrast to similar efforts in adult cancer genomics and have outlined a particular set of challenges to including genomics-based diagnoses in the clinical care of these rare diseases. Many efforts are now underway to address pediatric patients with relapsed or treatment refractory cancers using genomic technologies, advanced analytical approaches, and pathway level abstraction. My lecture will outline these challenges, identify our current approaches to address them, and share vignettes about our successes and failures, with a look to the future of this enterprise.

To accommodate a disability, please contact Ben Coffey at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute: becoffey@ucsc.edu, 831-459-1477.