Our Seminar Series - Upcoming & Historic

Oglesby Lecture Theatre

NBC Seminar: Paul Workman – Adventures in the biomarker-driven discovery and development of precision medicines: targeting AKT, brachyury, and Heat Shock Factor 1/the Integrated Stress Response

20th May 2025. 14:00

Paul Workman is a leading cancer research scientist known for pioneering many innovative cancer drugs and personalised medicines targeted at specific molecular abnormalities, a strategy he terms ‘drugging the cancer genome’. He also introduced the ‘Pharmacological Audit Trail’ – a concept and practical framework that is now widely-used, employing biomarkers to support informed drug development decisions. Paul’s multidisciplinary drug discovery research has closely integrated chemical biology approaches and his teams have discovered multiple clinical candidates and chemical probes for protein and lipid kinases and molecular chaperones like HSP90. Of note he was instrumental in the discovery of the approved EGFR inhibitor gefitinib (for EGFR mutant non small cell lung cancer) and the approved AKT inhibitor capivasertib (for ER-positive breast cancer). With experience in academia, biotech and pharma, Paul has pioneered the non-profit, academic team science model for drug discovery. Notably, he built and directed the CRUK Cancer Therapeutics Unit at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London from 1997 to 2016, where he oversaw the discovery of 21 drug candidates, 13 of which have entered clinical trials. From 2014-21, Paul served as Chief Executive and President of ICR and was Founding Director of the CRUK Convergence Science Centre at ICR and Imperial College. London. In addition, Paul was a Co-Founder of the biotech companies Chroma Therapeutics and Piramed Pharma (acquired by Roche), and is a Science Partner at Nextech Invest. He has won numerous awards and fellowships: Paul is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Fellow the Royal Society of Chemistry, Fellow of Royal Society of Biology, Fellow of the European Academy Cancer Sciences, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2024, Paul was named as the International Chemical Biology Society Global Lectureship Awardee and in 2025 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) Academy. Paul obtained his PhD in Cancer Pharmacology at Leeds University, and before joining ICR he held senior leadership roles at AstraZeneca, the CRUK Beatson Laboratories at Glasgow University and the MRC Clinical Oncology Unit at Cambridge University. He also spent an UICC ICRETT Fellowship-funded sabbatical at Stanford University. Paul is currently Harrap Professor of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the ICR, Co-Director of the CRUK Children’s Brain Tumour Centre of Excellence, hosted at ICR and Cambridge University, and Executive Director of the non-profit Chemical Probes Portal – an open science resource, hosted at ICR, to improve the selection and use of chemical tools in biomedical research.

Oglesby Lecture Theatre

Pierre Guermonprez – Tumor-infiltrating dendritic cells: should I stay or should I go?

21st May 2025. 14:00

Pierre Guermonprez is trained as a life science engineer. Pierre Guermonprez obtained his PhD at Pasteur Institute in 2000 and became a staff scientist at CNRS in 2004. Pierre Guermonprez performed his postdoctoral training under the supervision of Sebastian Amigorena at Curie Institute in Paris and Michel Nussenzweig at Rockefeller University in New York. Pierre Guermonprez has been group leader and faculty at King’s College London, U.K. from 2012 to 2020 and group leader at University of Paris Medical School, INSERMu1149 up to 2023. Pierre Guermonprez has investigated various aspects of dendritic cell biology including development, antigen presentation to T cells and their role in immune responses against cancer and infections. Pierre is now Principal Investigator, Dendritic cells and adaptive immunity at Institut Pasteur.

Oglesby Lecture Theatre

Eiji Hara – Cellular Senescence in Aging and Cancer: Insights into Microbial Interactions

6th June 2025. 14:00

Dr. Hara received his Ph.D. from Tokyo University of Science in 1993. After working at Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories, U.K. (Postdoctoral Fellow), Cancer Research UK-Paterson Institute, U.K. (Group Leader) and the Institute for Genome Research, University of Tokushima (Professor), he was appointed Division Chief in the Cancer Institute, Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research in 2008. He took his current position at The Research Institute for Microbial Diseases from 2015.

Oglesby Lecture Theatre

Joan Seoane

10th June 2025. 14:00

Joan Seoane is a Group Leader and Director of the Translational Research program at the Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO) within the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital since 2011. In 1998, Joan obtained his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Barcelona. Previously, in 1993, he obtained his BSc degree in Chemistry. Joan joined the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York as a post-doctoral fellow in 1998. From 1998 to 2001, he worked as a Research Fellow and subsequently, from 2001 to 2003, as a Research Associate. He was appointed ICREA Research Professor in 2004 and joined VHIO. In 2007, he became a member of the EMBO Young Investigator program and the recipient of a European Research Council (ERC) grant in 2008. Later, he obtained two ERC Proof of Concept grants (2011, 2013). In 2008, he became Board member of the European Association of Cancer Research (EACR) and Professor of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In 2016, he became Secretary General of the EACR.

Oglesby Lecture Theatre

Stefan Knapp

24th June 2025. 14:00

Prof Stefan Knapp studied Chemistry at the University of Marburg (Germany) and at the University of Illinois (USA). He did his PhD in protein crystallography at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm (Sweden) (1996) and continued his career at the Karolinska Institute as a postdoctoral scientist (1996-1999). In 1999, he joined the Pharmacia Corporation as a principal research scientist in structural biology and biophysics. He left the company in 2004 to set up a research group at the Structural Genomics Consortium at Oxford University (SGC). From 2008 to 2015 he was a Professor of Structural Biology at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine (NDM) at Oxford University (UK) and between 2012 and 2015 he was the Director for Chemical Biology at the Target Discovery Institute (TDI). He joined Frankfurt University (Germany) in 2015 as a Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and the Buchmann Institute of Molecular Life Sciences. He remains associated to the SGC as a visiting Professor at Oxford and he is also adjunct Professor of the George Washington University. Since 2017 he is the CSO of the newly founded SGC node at the Goethe-University Frankfurt. His research interests are the rational design of selective inhibitors that target protein kinases as well as protein interactions modules that function as reader domains of the epigenetic code.

Oglesby Lecture Theatre

Mikaël Pittet

1st July 2025. 14:00

Mikael Pittet completed his PhD thesis in Immunology at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and graduated from the University of Lausanne in 2001. He pursued his research at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston, United States, where he was named Samana Cay MGH Research Scholar in 2015, Director of the Center for Systems Biology Cancer Immunology Program in 2016, and full Professor at Harvard Medical School in 2019. He joined the Faculty of Medicine at UNIGE in 2020where he is appointed Full Professor in the Department of Pathology and Immunology, holding the ISREC Foundation Chair in Onco-Immunology. He is also a member of the Translational Research Centre in Onco-haematology of UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, and a consultant in the Department of Oncology of the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG). His research laboratory is physically located in Lausanne in the Agora Cancer Research Center, which assembles interdisciplinary research groups to translate advances in cancer research to the clinic. His research focuses on uncovering how the immune system controls cancer and other diseases, and how it can be harnessed for therapy. Pittet’s work has identified how cancers are regulated by various immune cells, including cytotoxic T cells, regulatory T cells, macrophages, monocytes, neutrophils, and dendritic cells. These cells are considered as drug targets in cancer immunotherapy.