Meet the experts

Prof. Attard is a Cancer Research UK Clinician Scientist and Team Leader at The Institute of Cancer Research and an Honorary Medical Oncology Consultant at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK.

He graduated with a degree in Medicine from the University of Malta in June 1999 and obtained a PhD in Medicine from the University of London (ICR) in 2010.

His main research interest is dissecting treatment resistance, currently with a focus on plasma DNA analysis, in order to inform on the development of novel therapeutics and biomarkers for castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC).

He is an experienced clinical trialist in CRPC and a co-author of more than 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts, including several important papers on advanced prostate cancer.

Prof. Attard’s many awards over the years include the ASCO Foundation Annual Merit Award in 2007, Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investor Award in 2008, the AACR-GlaxoSmithKline Outstanding Clinical Scholar Award in 2009, the Medical Research Society/Academy of Medical Sciences Sue McCarthy Prize in 2010 and the McElwain award in 2010. Prof. Attard sits on a number of advisory boards and the editorial board of Annals of Oncology.

Brian A. Costello, M.D., M.S. is a Consultant in the Division of Medical Oncology at Mayo Clinic Rochester and is an Associate Professor of Oncology and Urology. He received his medical degree from the Medical College of Wisconsin and completed his internal medicine residency at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. He then completed his medical oncology fellowship at Mayo Clinic. Dr. Costello was subsequently a Mayo Clinic Scholar during which time he focused on early phase clinical trials and genitourinary malignancies. Dr. Costello is currently the Chair of the Genitourinary Tumor Group of the Division of Medical Oncology at Mayo Clinic. He serves as a member of the NCCN Kidney Cancer Panel, the National Cancer Institute’s Renal Task Force, as well as the GU Cancers Core Committee of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology. He also previously served on the NCI Prostate Task Force from 2013 to 2016. He is actively involved in clinical and translational research and has a busy practice caring for patients with genitourinary cancers. Dr. Costello is actively involved in early drug development, especially in genitourinary malignancies. He is the Lead Investigator of the NCI-sponsored Mayo Phase II Program and is a member of the NCI’s Investigational Drug Steering Committee.

Shilpa Gupta, MD is an Associate Professor in the Division of Hematology, Oncology and Transplantation and the lead for the Phase 1 Interdisciplinary Solid Tumor
Program at the Masonic Cancer Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA.

Prior to joining the University of Minnesota in July 2015, Dr. Gupta was faculty in
Genitourinary Oncology and Experimental Therapeutics at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer
Center and Research Institute in Tampa, Florida for 4 years.

Dr. Gupta’s clinical and research interests are to treat patients with genitourinary malignancies and develop novel trials using targeted therapies and immunotherapies. She is currently the Principal investigator of several early and late phase trials in genitourinary oncology.

Dr. Gupta is passionate about her research and has published her research across a variety of peer-reviewed journals and book chapters.

Twitter: @shilpaonc
Email:guptash@umn.edu

Steven Joniau graduated in Urology in 2002 at the Catholic University of Leuven. In 2003, he was appointed full-time staff member at the Dept. of Urology, University Hospitals Leuven after a 1-year fellowship at the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff, UK. In July 2012, he obtained his PhD in Medical Sciences entitled ‘High-risk localized prostate cancer: the role of surgery and the development of clinical outcome prediction models’. In 2013, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven.

His principal field of interest is the management of urological cancers. He is heavily involved in uro- oncological surgery and the multidisciplinary approach of pelvic cancers. He also leads numerous research projects at the University Hospitals Leuven, which focus on lymph node staging in prostate cancer, surgical management and biomarker development of high-risk prostate cancer, the natural history of premalignant lesions of the prostate, chemoprevention of prostate and bladder cancer, minimally invasive treatment of renal cell cancer and prostate cancer, etc.

Steven Joniau is scientific secretary of the BVU (Belgische Vereniging voor Urologie), he is past- chairman of the Renal Cell Carcinoma Group of the Young Academic Urologists Working Party of the EAU, he is member of the EAU Guideline Panel on Prostate Cancer and the SIOG Prostate Cancer Guideline Panel.
He is also a member of several international scientific societies: EAU, SIU (Société Internationale d’Urologie), SIOG (International Society of Geriatric Oncology) and EORTC GUCG (European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer, Genito-Urinary Cancers Group).

He is appointed Associate Editor of ‘The Journal of OncoPathology’. He is Editorial Advisory Board member of ‘The European Journal of Surgical oncology’, Editorial Board member of ‘The Open Prostate Cancer Journal’, ‘Archivo Italiano di Urologia e Andrologia’, ‘The Central European Journal of Urology’ and International Scientific Board member of ‘Archivos Españoles de Urología’.

Steven Joniau has received several international awards, of which the First prize of the Urological Challenge Session, received at the 2010 European Urology Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the Crystal Matula Award 2011, received at the 2011 EAU annual congress in Vienna, Austria and the biannual Orion International Oncology Award 2011, received at the 2011 EAU annual congress in Vienna, Austria are the most prestigious.

In the last 10 years, he has published >170 papers in peer-reviewed journals in the field of uro- oncology and minimally invasive surgery. He received the Prize for the Best Paper published on Clinical Research in the Urological Literature at the EAU annual congress in Stockholm. He authored several book chapters, he has been invited Faculty in over 85 international congresses and is a faculty member of the ESU (European School of Urology).

Dr. Keizman is an expert in Genitourinary Oncology, particularly in prostate, bladder, kidney and testicular cancer; and at present serves as the head of the Genitourinary Oncology service at Meir Medical Center, Israel.

He graduated from The Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, and then completed his residency in Internal Medicine (at the Tel-Aviv Medical Center), Medical Oncology (at the Tel-Aviv Medical Center) and a Post Doctoral Clinical Fellowship in Genitourinary Oncology at the John Hopkins Hospital, Kimmel Cancer Center, Baltimore, USA.

He is the author of numerous studies and review articles published in medical journals, and a reviewer of numerous medical journals. He presented numerous studies in international meetings. His current research activity focuses on genitourinary oncology.

Tobias Klatte is Consultant Urological Surgeon at the Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. He is also a Visiting Researcher at the University of Cambridge and an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.

Dr Klatte obtained both his medical degree and doctoral degree at the University of Magdeburg, Germany. He received his clinical training at the Medical University of Vienna/Vienna General Hospital, where he subsequently joined the faculty and rose to the rank of associate professor. He moved to the UK in 2017, where he spent one year at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge before being appointed in Bournemouth.

His main clinical interests are minimally invasive and open surgery for renal and urothelial cancer. Dr Klatte completed a research fellowship in urological oncology at the University of California-Los Angeles.

His research is focused on kidney cancer and urothelial cancer, and he has published widely in these fields. In 2012, he completed his habilitation on prognostic factors in renal cell carcinoma.

Phillip J. Koo, MD is the Division Chief of Diagnostic Imaging at the Banner MD Anderson Cancer Center in Arizona. Prior to this, he was Chief of Nuclear Medicine and Associate Professor of Radiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Dr. Koo completed his transitional internship at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center-Presbyterian, radiology residency at Pennsylvania Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, and fellowship at the Harvard Medical School Joint Program in Nuclear Medicine. He is a diplomate of both the American Board of Radiology (ABR) and American Board of Nuclear Medicine.
Dr. Koo is an active member of multiple societies and serves on the Scientific Program Committee for the Radiological Society of North America, Nuclear Radiology Certifying Exam Committee for the ABR, and is the Chair of the Quality and Evidence Committee for the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI).  He is also Chair of the Prostate Cancer Working Group at the SNMMI and was a member of the RADAR I and II working groups.   
Dr. Koo has published on various topics related to radiology and nuclear medicine in multiple journals such as Radiology, Radiographics, European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, Urology, and Journal of the American College of Radiology.  

Dr. Miura is a Genitourinary Medical Oncologist working as a staff doctor in the Department of Medical Oncology at Toranomon Hospital, Tokyo, Japan. He completed his M. D. Degree in 2002 and received the board certification of the Japanese Society of Medical Oncology (JSMO) and the Japanese Society of Hematology (JSH) in 2010. He dedicates his time to some collaborative clinical trials in Japan as a principal investigator. He is currently undertaking basic research training at the University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center. The vision of Dr. Miura is to provide the co-existence of more effective and less toxic treatments with a peaceful life for cancer patients. His research interests are identifying biomarkers, especially those that predict adverse events of targeted therapy along with immunotherapy for renal cell carcinoma.

Martin Pichler obtained his MD at the Medical University of Graz in 2006, and his Master of Science in Molecular Biology at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Austria. Martin continued his cancer research training in different places, including The UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, USA (where he is Adjunct Faculty member at the Department of Experimental Therapeutics).

He currently works as a medical oncologist with special focus on Urogential- and Gastrointestinal cancer, at the Division of Oncology, Medical University of Graz, Austria.

He currently holds the research managing director position of this division and is the Head of the Research Unit for Non-Coding RNAs and Genome Editing in Cancer. His main research focus is to study molecular mechanisms of cancer biology, prognostic biomarker studies and clinical trials. He received several awards, grants and published about 170 peer-reviewed papers so far (forschung.medunigraz.at).

Dr. Schutz graduated from Parana Federal University and did his internal medicine residency at Hospital de Clinicas in Curitiba – PR, Brazil. Then, he moved to São Paulo – SP for his medical oncology clinical fellowship at Hospital Sirio Libanes.
After finishing his medical oncology fellowship, he worked for a couple of years as an assistant medical oncologist in the same hospital. From 2009 to 2011, he worked as a research fellow in genitourinary (GU) oncology in the Lank Center for GU Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute – Harvard Medical School in Boston – MA, USA. He developed several original research projects and authored many manuscripts in high impact journals.
Since mid-2011, he is working as a medical oncologist of the BP – Beneficencia Portuguesa de Sao Paulo in Sao Paulo – SP, Brazil. He is most interested and is currently conducting clinical trials in GU cancers.

Sandy Srinivas specializes in urologic oncology and takes care of patients with prostate, bladder, kidney, testes, penile and adrenal cancers. She has practised in this field now for more than 20 years. She is the clinical research group leader for Urologic Program at Stanford and is a principal investigator on numerous trials in urologic Oncology and is the medical director for the in-patient hematology Oncology unit.
She serves as the Vice-chair on the National Comprehensive Cancer Center (NCCN) panel for prostate cancer and has co-authored numerous publications and book chapters.
She has received numerous teaching awards and is a nationally recognized expert in the field of Urologic Oncology.

Evan Y. Yu, M.D., is a medical oncologist specializing in prostate, bladder, and testicular cancer treatment and research.  He graduated Alpha Omega Alpha from the University of Washington School of Medicine. He completed internal medicine residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and oncology fellowship and post-doctoral training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He returned to Seattle at the end of 2004 to join the faculty at the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Dr. Yu is a Full Professor of Medicine and Oncology, the Clinical Research Director for GU malignancies, Core Director for the Pacific Northwest Prostate Cancer SPORE and co-PI of the DoD Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials Consortium for his institution. His research focuses on testing the next wave of novel molecular targeted therapies and immunotherapy techniques, with a complementary focus on imaging biomarkers.

In addition to an active clinical and research practice, he also is the Medical Director for Clinical Research Services at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Consortium. Previously, he served as a Hematology/Oncology Fellowship Program Director for a decade at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He has regularly been voted a “Top Doctor” by Castle Connolly, U.S. News and World Report, Seattle magazine, and Seattle Met magazine.

He has served for many years on the National Cancer Institute Genitourinary Cancers Steering Committee and is the Co-Chair for the National Cancer Institute Prostate Cancer Task Force. Dr. Yu remains active in SWOG, the Cancer Immunotherapy Trials Network and he also serves as a senior editor for Clinical Cancer Research and Uro-Today.

Scientific director at Sociedad de Oncología y Hematología del Cesar, Valledupar, Colombia. Chief of Genitourinary Unit and Clinical Research Unit.
Medical Oncologist at Clínica Portoazul, Barranquilla, Colombia.
I completed medical school at Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla Colombia. 
Medical oncologist from University Hospital 12 de Octubre in Madrid, Genitourinary Fellow in the GU unit at  University Hospital 12 de Octubre.
Master in molecular oncology from Centro de estudios biosanitarios, CNIIO, ESO.
Founder of Grupo de Oncología Genitourinaria de Colombia. 
Member of SEOM, ACHO and LACOG-GU.

I focus my practice on patients with prostate, bladder, kidney and testicular cancer. 

Dr. Elena Castro is a Consultant Medical Oncologist and leads the GU Translational Research Unit at Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Málaga, Spain.  She treats patients with advanced bladder and prostate cancer, most of them within the context of clinical trials.
She studied medicine and obtained a PhD from the University of Salamanca, Spain.  After training in medical oncology, she completed a four-year fellowship in Cancer Genetics at the Institute of Cancer Research, UK.  
Later, she joined the Spanish National Cancer Research Center as a clinician-scientist.  Her research has focused on addressing the clinical implications of genetic and genomic variants in prostate cancer, receiving several awards for her work.
She has also authored numerous articles published in international peer-reviewed journals including some relevant papers on the impact of germline variants in prostate cancer.   

Georg C. Hutterer obtained his MD in 2001 at the Karl-Franzens Universität Graz, Austria.  He completed a one-year post-doctoral research fellowship at the Cancer Prognostics and Health Outcomes Unit, University of Montreal Health Center (CHUM), Montreal, QC, Canada, under supervision of Prof. Pierre I. Karakiewicz, MD, FRCSC, where he published numerous peer-reviewed papers about different aspects of renal cell carcinoma including novel prognostic factors and models.
Prof. Hutterer is an experienced Urologist with special focus on the treatment of advanced renal cell-, urothelial-, and prostate cancer patients.  He received several research awards and grants, published over 100 peer-review papers to date and currently is the 2. Deputy Chairman of the Department of Urology of the Medical University of Graz.

Neeraj Agarwal, MD, is a Professor in the Division of Oncology, Department of Medicine, at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He is the Senior Director for Clinical Research Innovation at Huntsman Cancer Institute, and the HCI Presidential Endowed Chair of Cancer Research. He also serves as the Director of the Genitourinary Oncology Program at the Huntsman Cancer Institute, Salt Lake City, Utah, and directs the Center of Investigational Therapeutics and co-leads the “Experimental Therapeutic Program” at HCI.
As a specialist in adult hematology and oncology, Dr. Agarwal cares for patients with all types of cancer and specializes in genitourinary malignancies (cancers of the prostate, kidney, bladder and testes).
Dr. Agarwal is a member of several professional societies, including the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) and the Southwest Oncology Group (SWOG). After receiving his MD degree from All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, India, Dr. Agarwal completed a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in geriatric medicine at the University of Iowa. He then completed a hematology-oncology fellowship at HCI and the University of Utah School of Medicine.
Dr. Agarwal has received several awards and grants and has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He has given talks at several prestigious regional and national forums, and serves as a panel member for the NCCN guideline-committees for bladder and kidney cancer. Dr. Agarwal also serves as the overall study chair and/or steering committee member of multiple national and international clinical trials in GU cancers.
Dr. Agarwal has the prestigious honor of being chosen as one of the five young investigators of the Southwest Oncology Group in 2009. He has been appointed as the leader of early therapeutics of the SWOG Genitourinary Cancer Committee in 2010. Dr. Agarwal is also the recipient of the prestigious 2009-2010 William D. Odell Young Investigator award from the University of Utah’s, Department of Medicine, and the 2014 Cancer Clinical Investigator Team Leadership Award from the National Cancer Institute.

Following a residency at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, Dr. Dorff came to LAC + USC Medical Center for her hematology and medical oncology fellowship. She currently heads the Genitourinary group within the Department of Medical Oncology at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center.

In addition to being a devoted clinician and translational researcher, Dr. Dorff has authored more than 45 peer reviewed articles as well as 35 review articles/commentaries.

Dr. Dorff serves as an associate editor for Clinical Genitourinary Cancer and Seminars in Urologic Oncology. She has lectured on prostate and bladder cancer treatment nationally and internationally and has presented her research at national meetings.

Current research interests include the effects of fasting on chemotherapy side effects and cancer control and immunotherapy for prostate cancer. She has been the principal investigator for more than a dozen clinical trials, involving targeted therapy and immunotherapy, for genitourinary cancers.

Dr. Higano is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Urologic Science at the University of British Columbia, and serves as the Medical Director of the Prostate Cancer Supportive Care Program (pcscprogram.ca). She graduated from University of Massachusetts Medical School, finished internal medicine residency at Mayo Graduate School of Medicine, and completed hematology/oncology fellowship at University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson. Her research interests focus on new drug development including immunotherapy, the effects of androgen deprivation therapy on the male body and mind, and development of supportive care/survivorship programs for prostate cancer patients and their partners.

Dr Roberto Iacovelli studied medicine at the “Sapienza” University of Rome, Italy. At the same University, he specialized in medical oncology and had the PhD in molecular medicine and human pathology. He has international experience as a fellow at the Institute Gustave Roussy in France and as an oncologist in main referral oncological centres in Italy.
Currently, he is a medical oncologist at the University Hospital of Verona, Italy. His research activities focus on metastatic renal cell carcinoma, prostate, and bladder cancer. His major interest is in predictive and prognostic factors in GU cancers as well as the sequence of therapy in renal cancer. He has published more than one hundred papers in international peer-reviewed journals and several abstracts at international conferences on these topics.
Dr Iacovelli has received many national and international awards, such as the ASCO Cancer Foundation Merit Award in 2011 and the best poster award at the ESMO congress in 2012.

Dr. Morgans is Genitourinary Medical Oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Faculty in Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. She completed medical school and residency at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, fellowship in Hematology/Oncology at Harvard’s Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston and earned a Master of Public Health at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Morgans treats patients with prostate, bladder, and testicular cancer, and her research assesses complications of advanced prostate cancer survivorship and patient-centered treatment decision-making in advanced prostate cancer.

After finishing medical school in November 2004 Dr. Pfister started his residency in the Department of Urology at the University of Cologne. For his endoscopic training, he switched to the General Hospital in Weiden (Oberpfalz/Bavaria) between August 2006 and March 2007. After returning to Cologne Dr. Pfister heightened my oncologic education under Prof. Heidenreich. The oncologic training consisted of two arms: medical and surgical oncology. In 2009 his education was augmented at the University Hospital of Aachen. In 2010 he passed his urologic board exam.

Since 2011 Dr. Pfister has been working as a staff urologist with main interests in castration-resistant prostate cancer and testicular cancer. In 2011 he passed the Charles Huggins grant, an educational grant at the Center for Prostate Disease Research in Maryland, USA. In 2012 Dr. Pfister received an additional qualification in the systemic treatment of solid tumours and since that time he has organised and led the urological clinical trial centre.

In 2012 Dr. Pfister qualified as a Professor and became an Associate Professor in November 2012 for medical oncologic treatment in urological tumours. At the end of 2015 he became the Commissionary Leader of the Urologic Department of the University of Aachen.

Since 2016 Dr. Pfister has become the Deputy Director of the Department of Urology, Uro-oncology and Robot-Assisted Surgery, University Hospital of Cologne. Special interest is castration-resistant, radiation-resistant prostate cancer and testicular cancer.

Neal D. Shore, MD, FACS is the Medical Director for the Carolina Urologic Research Center. He practices with Atlantic Urology Clinics in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Dr. Shore has conducted more than 350 clinical trials, focusing mainly on GU Oncology, and serves on the Executive Boards of: Society of Urologic Oncology Board, Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network, and is Immediate Past President, Large Urology Group Practice Association. He is a founder for both: CUSP Clinical Trials Consortium, as well as for DASHKO, large urology practices data registries. He serves as the National Urology Research Director for 21st Century Oncology. He has served on the AUA Male Health Committee and the AUA Data Committee, the SITC Task Force for Prostate Cancer, the Bladder Cancer Advocacy Think Tank and the editorial boards of Reviews in Urology, Urology Times, Chemotherapy Advisor, OncLive, PLOS ONE(Academic Editor), Urology Practice, World Journal of Urology, and serves as Editor, Everyday Urology-Oncology.
He has more than 200 peer reviewed publications and numerous book chapters; he performs peer review for Lancet Oncology, New England Journal of Medicine, European Urology, Journal Urology, Urology, BJUI, PCPD, and numerous other high impact scientific journals.
A graduate of Duke University and Duke University Medical School, Dr. Shore completed a 6-month clinical research fellowship in Pretoria, South Africa, and then completed his General Surgery/Urology training at New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center and at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.

Gert De Meerleer is currently head-of-clinics at the department of Radiation Oncology at University Hospital Leuven.  His main field of interest is urologic oncology with a focus on implementing modern radiation technology in the treatment of prostate cancer, kidney cancer, testicular cancer and to a lesser extent, bladder cancer. 

He has pioneered the implementation of stereotactic body radiotherapy in the treatment of oligometastatic prostate cancer, which has led to a paradigm shift in the treatment of these patients.
 
Gert De Meerleer successfully defended his PhD in 2000.  In this PhD, he described the implementation of intensity-modulated radiotherapy in the treatment of prostate cancer.  Since then, he (co-)promoted several other PhD’s, most of them dealing with the implementation of intensity-modulated radiotherapy (including arc therapy) in the treatment of urological and, to a lesser extent, gynaecologic malignancies.  
 
He is an active member of the multidisciplinary working group of urological malignancies at Leuven University Hospital.  He has also (co-)authored more than 150 A1 publications, most of them in the field of urological oncology, co-edited several booklets on prostate cancer and was granted several times and by different organizations (FWO, VLK, Stichting tegen Kanker, Movember) for his scientific research.
 
He is full professor at Leuven (KUL), with a main focus on scientific research in the treatment of urologic malignancies, with a special focus on the interaction of stereotactic body radiotherapy and systemic treatments.  He pioneered the implementation of metastasis-directed therapy in the treatment of oligometastatic urologic malignancies.
 
Gert De Meerleer is co-president of the Belgian Radiotherapy Awareness and Visibility Organization (BRAVO),  board member of Scientific Summits, a high-level scientific Belgian organization and a member of the scientific jury of the “Federation against Cancer”. 
 
He is an experienced international speaker at urologic and oncologic congresses, a reviewer for several international cancer organizations and high-ranked journals and is also involved in teaching within Belgium and Europe.