Dr. Tobias Janowitz MD/Ph.D.

Tobias Janowitz is a medical oncologist with a specialist interest in pancreatic cancer, the cancer with the highest incidence of cancer associated cachexia. He leads a research laboratory and clinical research team focused on the whole-body response to cancer. For example, his team discovered that interleukin-6, a tumor released inflammatory cytokine, alters liver metabolism to suppress ketogenesis. They also found that interleukin-6 acts on the brain to contribute to the reduced appetite, which patients with cachexia suffer from. Together, these effects activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and immune suppressing elevations of glucocorticoids. Tobias was educated at the University of Hanover in Germany, the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and he is now based at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the United States.

Dr Tony Coll PhD FRCP

Dr Tony Coll is a University Associate Professor (University of Cambridge) and an Honorary Consultant Physician (Addenbrooke’s Hospital, CUHFT). Based in the Wellcome Trust-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science, he co-leads (with O’Rahilly and Yeo) a research programme that aims to understand biological processes controlling eating behaviour and how we store and use energy. He also has an active clinical practice based within the Wolfson Diabetes and Endocrine Clinic.

Dr. Giulia Biffi

After her PhD at the CRUK Cambridge Institute, University of Cambridge, Giulia trained at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as an EMBO and HFSP Post-doctoral Fellow. Since 2020, she is a Junior Group Leader at the CRUK Cambridge Institute. She is also a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and co-director of the Pancreatic Cancer Programme at the CRUK Cambridge Centre.

Dr. Norbert Perrimon

Norbert Perrimon currently serves as the James Stillman Professor of Developmental Biology in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, having held various faculty positions at these institutions since 1986. He is also an affiliate member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and an associate member of the Broad Institute. Dr. Perrimon holds a doctorate in developmental genetics and a master’s in biochemistry from the University of Paris VI and completed a research fellowship at Case Western Reserve University.

Richard F. Dunne, MD, MS

Dr. Dunne is an associate professor of medicine and the Leader of the Gastrointestinal (GI) Cancer Program at the Wilmot Cancer Institute and University of Rochester Medical Center. He is a medical oncologist that specializes in the care of patients with GI malignancies. His research focuses on developing novel therapies to treat GI cancers and cancer-associated weight loss and muscle wasting.

Dr David Y Lewis, PhD

David Lewis is a Group Leader at the CRUK The Scotland Institute in Glasgow, where he leads a multi-disciplinary team of chemists, physicists, biologists and mathematicians developing better ways to image cancer. David’s research focuses on metabolic imaging of nutrient use in cancer, he is passionate about combining imaging and spatial biology technologies to provide new insights into cancer and cachexia development. In the Grand Challenge Dr Lewis will be using state-of the-art imaging technologies such as Total-Body PET to visualise metabolic rewiring during cachexia development. These imaging methods offer new insights into the causes of cachexia and provide ways to identify and characterise cachexia early offering the best chance of cure.

Bette Caan, DrPH

Bette Caan, DrPH, is a senior research scientist and nutritional epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente, Division of Research. She directs a NIH-funded research program examining modifiable lifestyle risk factors for progression of cancer, focusing on sarcopenia, cachexia, body composition and energy balance risk factors. Dr. Caan has authored or co-authored over 450 publications covering a wide range of topics, recently publishing several papers on body composition and cancer outcomes, demonstrating that sarcopenia leads to a poorer prognosis, inferior surgical outcomes, and increased chemotoxicity.

Sheng (Tony) Hui, PhD

I have extensive research experiences on metabolism including those related to cancer metabolism. In graduate school, I identified the origin of bacterial overflow metabolism, a phenomenon similar to the Warburg effect in cancer. During my postdoctoral training, I discovered that the circulating lactate is an important fuel source for tumors. In addition, I established a framework for systematically quantifying fluxes for circulating metabolites. These experiences and expertise will be invaluable for defining the tumor-host metabolic interactions in cancer cachexia and eventually identifying the metabolic cause of the disease.

Elizabeth Cespedes Feliciano, ScD, MS

Elizabeth M. Cespedes Feliciano, ScD, SM, is a Research Scientist II at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University, a Masters in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a doctorate in Epidemiology and Nutrition, also from Harvard University. Dr. Cespedes Feliciano’s NIH-funded research program focuses on identifying and understanding the relationships between energy balance, body composition, modifiable risk factors, and cancer survivorship.

Professor Sir Stephen O’Rahilly, MD FRS FMedSci

Stephen O'Rahilly is Co-Director of the Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science (IMS), Director of the MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit, Professor of Clinical Biochemistry and Medicine , and Head of the Department of Clinical Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. On the wider Cambridge Biomedical Campus, he is the Scientific Director of the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre. He was elected FRS in 2003, to the National Academy of Sciences, USA in 2011, and has received five honorary doctorates and numerous scientific awards including the 2014 Zülch Prize of the Max Planck Society, the 2014 Baly Medal of the RCP (London), in 2015 was the first recipient of the EASD/Novo Nordisk Foundation Diabetes Prize for Excellence and in 2019 received the Banting Medal for Scientific Achievement, American Diabetes Association. In 2013 he was made Knight Bachelor "for services to medical research". His main research area is the etiology and pathophysiology of human metabolic and endocrine disease and how such information might be used to improve the diagnosis, therapy and prevention of these diseases.

Steven B. Heymsfield, MD

Dr. Heymsfield is a physician scientist whose research focuses on human metabolism and body composition in health and disease across the lifespan. He has published studies ranging from molecular mechanisms in disease to new pharmacologic therapies for obesity and diabetes. Dr. Heymsfield has served as President of the three major medical nutrition societies, The American Society of Clinical Nutrition, The American Society of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition, and The Obesity Society.

Dr. Marcus Goncalves

Marcus Goncalves is a physician-scientist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. As a practicing endocrinologist, he has developed therapeutic and dietary strategies to modulate systemic glucose and insulin levels in patients with cancer, and he is currently involved in several clinical studies to assess dietary interventions in this population. His research group is focused on metabolic Oncology, where systemic hormones, dietary nutrients, and tumor nutrient sensing pathways are manipulated to enhance anti-cancer therapy or protect the host against cancer-induced complications like cachexia. Dr. Goncalves is the inaugural Ralph L. Nachman, M.D. Research Scholar at Weill Cornell and has received grants from the national Cancer Institute, the AACR-The Mark Foundation for Cancer research, and The Lung Cancer Research Foundation. He regularly cares for patients with cancer experiencing endocrine complications such as cachexia and other metabolic disease in his clinical practice.

Dr. Mariam Jamal Hanjani

Dr Mariam Jamal-Hanjani is a Group Leader and Clinician scientist at the University College London Cancer Institute. Her group studies the biological processes driving metastatic disease and death in lung cancer, including tumor- and host-initiated mediators of cachexia, and failure of the adaptive immune system leading to tumor immune escape. She is Principal Investigator of the national TRACERx lung cancer evolution study and Chief Investigator of the PEACE research autopsy programme, which together aim to understand the evolutionary processes underlying cancer progression and metastasis.

Dr. Eileen White

Eileen White, PhD is a cancer biologist known for her work establishing that a DNA tumor virus oncogene functions by inhibiting programmed cell death by apoptosis and is a homologue of the human BCL-2 oncogene. She is also known for establishing that tumor cells induce intracellular nutrient scavenging by autophagy, which promotes their metabolism, growth, survival, and malignancy. These findings informed the means to target the apoptosis and autophagy pathways for cancer therapy.

Eileen is Deputy Director and Chief Scientific Officer at the Rutgers Cancer Institute at Rutgers University, and Associate Director, Ludwig Princeton Branch, Princeton University. She is also the Lead PI for the CRUK/NCI Cancer Grand Challenge to address the mechanisms causing cancer cachexia through the CANcer Cachexia Action Network. Amongst Eileen’s honors are membership in the US National Academy of Sciences, and she is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Association for Cancer Research Academy.

Tracy G. Anthony, Ph.D.

Tracy G. Anthony is a professor with tenure in the department of nutritional sciences at Rutgers University. Her laboratory studies adaptive responses to changes in nutrient supply and environmental stress. The goal of this work is to identify novel approaches to treat serious diseases and promote health span. Her group has published many high impact publications describing mechanisms of metabolic and proteostasis control in multiple organ systems. Dr. Anthony received a bachelor’s degree in nutrition from Virginia Tech, master’s and doctoral degrees in nutritional sciences from the University of Illinois, and postdoctoral training in cellular and molecular physiology at the Penn State College of Medicine. She then joined the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Indiana University School of Medicine as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor with tenure before moving to Rutgers. Dr. Anthony is the recipient of the 2023 Osborne and Mendel Award given by the American Society for Nutrition (ASN) for outstanding recent basic research accomplishments in nutrition. She was also the inaugural recipient of the ASN Peter J. Reeds Young Investigator Award for recognition of research which focuses on the regulation of somatic growth and the unique roles of amino acids in protein metabolism. Dr. Anthony has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles indexed on PubMed, many of which are highly cited, and her research is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the United States Department of Agriculture. Dr. Anthony has served on multiple grant review panels/study sections at the NIH, and she currently serves on the editorial boards of Advances in Nutrition, The Journal of Biological Chemistry, and Annual Review of Nutrition. She is a member of ASN as well as the American Physiological Society and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Sean Parnell MS; MPH

Sean Parnell is the Program Manager for the CANCAN project. Sean has spent a fifteen-year career in biomedical research and public health. After working as a program evaluation specialist in the pharmaceutical industry and at the Department of Human Services, he was asked to join the CANCAN team as the Program Manager to help understand one of the most complex topics in cancer research. He is excited to manage team CANCAN to help investigators understand the mechanisms behind cancer cachexia.

Shawn Davidson Ph.D.

Dr. Shawn Davidson is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Department of Pulmonary Critical Care at Northwestern University in Chicago, IL, US. He received his Ph.D. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2017. His postdoctoral research at Brigham and Women’s focused on developing bioengineering approaches to study metabolism of tumor and immune cells using both imaging mass-spectrometry and an engineering approach to create metabolic perturbations in the tumor microenvironment. Dr. Davidson was a Lewis-Sigler Fellow at Princeton University where his laboratory pioneered ‘Iso-imaging’ – the coupling of stable isotope tracing to imaging mass spectrometry. Our work in progress for CanCan uses Iso-imaging to investigate metabolic dysregulation in animal tumor models, particularly in lung and pancreatic cancer.

Karen Mustian, PhD, MPH, ASCM, FSBM

Dr. Mustian received her Ph.D. in Exercise Science at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, her Masters in Public Health with focus in Clinical Investigation/ Epidemiology at the University of Rochester, and a Graduate Certificate in Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine from Drexel University. Dr. Mustian is an international leader in the fields of Cancer Control and Survivorship, Integrative Oncology, Exercise Oncology, Geriatric Oncology, Behavioral Oncology and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Health. Dr. Mustian is MPI (contact) and Co-Director of the University of Rochester Cancer Center NCORP Research Base (URCC NCORP Research Base). Dr. Mustian has over 20 years of experience in the science and operations of the URCC NCORP Research Base and conducting large, multi-center, phase III clinical trials among cancer patients and survivors with community-based NCORPs across the country.

Dr. Thales Papagiannakopoulos, PhD

Dr. Thales Papagiannakopoulos is an associate professor and principal investigator at New York University in the Department of Pathology. He earned his Ph.D. in 2010 from UC Santa Barbara. Following this, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Tyler Jacks Laboratory at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2015, Thales transitioned to New York University, where he leads the Thales Papagiannakopoulos Laboratory. Dr. Papagiannakopoulos has authored and co-authored numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers and has presented his work at national and international conferences. His laboratory focuses on CRISPR/Cas9-based in vivo and in vitro approaches to study KRAS-driven lung cancer, which is the most common subtype of lung cancer and one of the most aggressive and lethal solid tumors. Since establishing his laboratory in October 2015, his team has made significant strides in characterizing a major genetic subset of lung adenocarcinoma with NRF2/KEAP1 mutations. In 2024, Dr. Papagiannakopoulos joined the CANCAN team for a pilot study aimed at investigating the mechanisms underlying the effects of dietary fat on cachexia in lung cancer.

Dr. Ed Reznik, PhD

Ed Reznik is an Associate Member at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he leads a computational research group focused on understanding cellular and systemic metabolism in cancer patients. Dr. Reznik is collaborating with the CANCAN team on a pilot study that investigates changes in body composition associated with cachexia using specialized computational analysis.