Panellists
Prof. Dr. Karolien Goffin is staff member of nuclear medicine at the University Hospital Leuven and associate professor at KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. She is part of the multidisciplinary teams dealing with uro-oncology, functional urology, neuro-oncology, epilepsy, breast cancer, and head-and-neck oncology. Her main research interests are preclinical development of diagnostic and therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals, the application of existing oncological PET tracers in a broad range of malignancies and clinical settings and the introduction of novel PET tracers and therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals in (uro-)oncology.
Prof. Goffin is board member of the Belgian Multidisciplinary meeting on Urological Cancers (BMUC) and of the Imaging Group of the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC). She is chair of the Oncology and Theranostics Committee of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM). She is editorial board member of the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (EJNMMI), Journal of Nuclear Medicine (JNM), Cancers, and of Clinical and Translational Imaging (CATI).
Sofia Carrilho Vaz is a nuclear medicine physician working at Champalimaud Clinical Center – Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal. Oncology is her main field of expertise. She is a PhD candidate at Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands, and her work is centred in breast cancer. As a member of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) Oncology & Theranostics Committee she has collaborated in some EANM guidelines, particularly in breast cancer, and European School of Multimodality Imaging & Therapy (ESMIT) initiatives. She belongs to the examination committee of the European Union of Medical Specialists – European Board of Nuclear Medicine. She is also the president of the General Assembly of the Portuguese Society of Nuclear Medicine and an Associated Editor of the British Journal of Radiology.
Isabel T. Rubio is the Head of Breast Surgical Oncology at Clinica Universidad de Navarra and Professor of Surgery at the University of Navarra in Madrid, Spain. She is the Director of the EUSOMA certified Breast Center. Board certified General Surgeon, Breast Surgical Oncology Fellow at Arkansas Cancer Center at Little Rock, USA and at the MD Anderson CC in Houston, Texas, USA. Dr. Rubio is active in many societies, as President of the European Society of Surgical Oncology (ESSO), EUSOMA past president, co-Chair of the Prevention, Early detection and screening of the European Cancer Organization, officer at the UEMS Breast Surgery Division, founding member and past President of the Spanish Association of Breast Surgeons (AECIMA), Founding member of EUBREAST. She is the Breast Associate Editor of the Journal of Surgical Oncology Published over 199 manuscripts and book chapters. She has participated in the WHO Global breast cancer initiative and PI of several clinical trials.
Gary Cook trained in radiology and then nuclear medicine in London. In 2011 he returned to King’s College London and Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospitals to the Chair of Molecular Imaging as a clinical academic and a nuclear medicine physician in the KCL and Guy’s & St Thomas’ PET Centre. His research interests include imaging bone metastases, measuring tumour heterogeneity, radiomics and AI, evaluation of novel tracers and biomarkers and refining multimodality imaging for diagnosis and response assessment in oncology.
I am a Clinical Professor at the Department of Nuclear Medicine, Odense University Hospital/University of Southern Denmark. My work is grounded in evidence-based medicine and is designed to address patient-relevant questions with a strong focus on clinical implementation. I believe in the importance of formulating research ideas in collaboration with patient representatives.
My primary research area is clinical breast cancer using 18F-FDG-PET/CT. We have shown its superior diagnostic accuracy in detecting metastatic breast cancer and its impact on clinical practice and patient benefit. Looking ahead, our research activities will provide level I evidence validating the potential survival benefit for metastatic breast cancer patients monitored with 18F-FDG-PET/CT in a prospective randomised clinical trial as part of a European collaboration in www.premiocollab.eu.
I am also involved in a study on 18F-FAPI-PET/CT for staging patients newly diagnosed with high-risk primary breast cancer.
I am a nuclear medicine physician specialist. Since 08/24 I hold a professorship for “Imaging Host Responses” at the European Institute for Molecular Imaging of the University of Münster and the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the University Hospital Münster in Germany. In the department of Nuclear Medicine I am senior physician and head of the diagnostics division.
I received my medical degree at the University of Würzburg in 2015. I clinically trained in Nuclear Medicine at the University Hospital Münster and at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. I completed my Nuclear Medicine specialization in Germany in 2021 and became American Board of Nuclear Medicine certified in 2022.
I work as a postdoc clinician scientist since 2017 and am now leading a research group. My research focuses on molecular imaging of the tumor microenvironment with an emphasis on PET imaging in breast cancer.
Dr. Romeo is a breast Radiologist and Researcher at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy. Her research activities are focused on the use of advanced imaging modalities such as PET/MRI in breast imaging, particularly on the application of AI techniques for breast cancer diagnosis, characterization, stading and response to systemic treatment.
Professor and Chair, Department of Nuclear Medicine, Technical University of Munich (TUM)
Training and degrees
1993-1998 Residency Training in Nuclear Medicine, Technical University of Munich
1995 Doctorate in Medicine, “summa cum laude”, TUM, 1995
1998-2003 Attending Physician, Department of Nuclear Medicine, TUM
2002 Habilitation in Nuclear Medicine, TUM
Postgraduate professional career
2003-2007 Associate Professor, Molecular and Medical Pharmacology, University of California, Los Angeles
2007-2013 Professor and Chair, Department of Nuclear Medicine, University of Freiburg
2013-2018 Professor of Radiology, Weill-Cornell Medical College, Chief, Molecular Imaging and Therapy, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York
2018 Chair, Department of Nuclear Medicine, TUM
Other scientific responsibilities
2016- Associate Editor, Journal of Nuclear Medicine
2019- Associate Editor, European Journal of Nuclear Medicine
Carolien Schröder, MD, PhD, is a medical oncologist, with a focus on breast cancer, at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (AVL-NKI) Amsterdam, and the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), the Netherlands. Schröder’s research focus is molecular imaging of hormone- and immune receptors and their implementation in clinical practice, and rare breast cancer subgroups including male breast cancer and inflammatory breast cancer. She has initiated and led multiple studies, from early phase- to multicenter (inter)national clinical trials such as the ongoing Dutch multicenter SONImage imaging study, using FES-PET to predict of CDK inhibition benefit. She is involved in national breast cancer guideline development. Her research, funded by different institutions including the Dutch Cancer Society, led to over 125 scientific publications, with an H-index of >40. She is a frequently invited speaker at (inter)national conferences for colleagues and patients.
Gary Ulaner is the James & Pamela Muzzy Endowed Chair of Molecular Imaging and Therapy (MIT) at the Hoag Family Cancer Institute and Professor of Radiology and Translational Genomics at the University of Southern California. He has been the PI for more than a dozen novel MIT agents for patients with breast, prostate, neuroendocrine, pancreatic, and myeloma malignancies, funded by two NIH R01s and grants from the Department of Defense (DoD) Breast Cancer Research Programs and Komen Foundation. His trials emphasize targeting ER, HER2, PSMA, SSTR and CD38. Gary is on the editorial board of 4 leading radiology journals, authored the text “Fundamentals of Oncologic PET/CT”, and is on the scientific advisory boards of GE Healthcare, Lantheus, Nuclidium, Precirix, and the Lobular Breast Cancer Alliance. Gary lives in California, with his wife, Alena, son, Ilya, and daughter, Anabel. He met Alena while swing dancing, and they are still dancing, albeit with less frequency.
Dr Gennari’s areas of expertise include diagnostic and therapeutic innovation in breast cancer. Her current research is focused on the identification of individual drug responsiveness in breast tumors and therapy optimization in metastatic breast cancer.
Other active research areas include the evaluation of host metabolism in breast cancer, and functional imaging by PET-CT with 18F-FES to evaluate endocrine responsiveness in advanced breast cancer. She is the PI and Coordinator of the ERA-NET JTC 2011 project (European TRANSCAN project) – Early prediction of efficacy of endocrine therapy in breast cancer: pilot study and validation with 18F Fluoroestradiol (ET-FES project).
She is also expanding research interests in immunotherapy and response prediction in BC. She acts as referee for numerous high-profile oncology journals, and has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed publications as well as numerous book chapters, abstracts, and other articles.
David GROHEUX, MD, PHD, is a French nuclear physician with expertise in oncology. He practices at the Saint-Louis hospital in PARIS, where he is also a researcher, within a multidisciplinary team seeking to better understand the development of breast cancer in order to better treat it. He has mainly worked on the role of FDG PET/CT in the initial staging of breast cancer and in the early assessment of neoadjuvant treatment. In parallel with his research activity in Paris, he developed PET imaging in two departments in France, La Charente-Maritime and les Deux-Sèvres, by installing the first PET-Scan centers in these departments.