Dr Olivier MENZEL

President and Founder

PhD, University of Geneva, Switzerland

Born in Sorengo (Ticino), Switzerland in 1975, graduated (B.Sc.) in biology at the University of Geneva in 1999. In 2001, he obtained his M.Sc. in Medical Genetics at the Department of Genetic Medicine and Development in Geneva. During this tenure, he specialized in molecular and human genetics. In 2001 he was awarded the prize for the best M.Sc. work in the field of biomedical and biotechnologies ("ASIRB-ROCHE"), as well as the prize for the best post-university M.Sc. work ("Regio Insubrica") in 2002. Subsequently he moved to Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC-EPFL) where he obtained his PhD. In December 2006, he joined the research laboratory of pediatric surgery, as Senior Research Assistant. He is supervising and working on the project of ex vivo gene therapy of rare metabolic liver diseases using lentiviral-mediated transduction of deficient hepatocytes followed by immediate auto-transplantation. In 2009 he was awarded the prize for the best original scientific work by the Swiss Society of Pediatric Surgery, as well as the esteemed funding from the Von Meissner Foundation.

Vincenzo PIANTEDOSI

Member of the Board of Directors

General Director BSI SA - Lugano, Switzerland

Born in Naples, Italy in 1956, graduated in Political Science at the University of Bridgeport and obtained a postgraduate degree in Finance at New York University GBA. In 1980, he joined Irving Trust Company in New York where he worked in the Correspondent Banking and Foreign Investments Divisions.  In 1983 he moved to Switzerland at the Lugano based Banca della Svizzera Italiana (BSI) where he worked in the Commodities and Corporate Finance Divisions.  Since 1991 he was appointed to the Board of most of the BSI Group Foreign Affiliates. In 1998 he became the Managing Director of three Milan based BSI Group affiliates which in 2002 he merged into Banca BSI Italia SpA. In May 2004 he was appointed to the Executive Board of BSI SA and to the Board of Directors of all major BSI Group Foreign Affiliates serving as either Chairman or Member of each Board and its respective Audit Committee.

Massimo RICCARDI

Member of the Board of Directors

Lawyer – Lugano, Switzerland

Prof Barbara WILDHABER

Presidente of the Scientific Committee

MD, PD; Children Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland

Professor Wildhaber is the head of the Clinic of Pediatric Surgery in Geneva. She is a pediatric surgeon specialized in pediatric hepatobiliary surgery and liver transplantation and responsible of the pediatric liver transplantation program at the Children's Hospital of Geneva in close collaboration with the adult liver transplantation team. She worked during three years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, in fundamental research in the field of parenteral nutrition and short bowel disease and their influence on small bowel and liver, and has published multiple papers about this subject and received several prices on national and international meetings. Since 2003 she has been working together with the pediatric surgery research laboratory of the Children's Hospital of Geneva, achieving several publications. She has been working in clinical research as well, and has established a Swiss national database of all children with biliary atresia, and neonatal disease of the biliary tree leading to sever liver cirrhosis and, in most cases, needing liver transplantation. She has received distinct funding for her research.

Prof Stylianos E. ANTONARAKIS

MD, PhD, Head of the Dpt. of Genetic medicine and development, Geneva

Professor Stylianos Antonarakis is the Director of the Division of Medical Genetics at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Before moving to Geneva he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University in the USA. His lab participates in many projects involving the genetics of monogenic and polygenic disorders as well as the annotation of the human genome and particularly of human chromosome 21. He is on the editorial board of many high profile journals such as Genome Research and Genomics and has recently served as president of the European Society for Human Genetics.

Dr Jacques BIRRAUX

MD; Children Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland

Dr. Birraux is currently consultant at the Clinic of Pediatric Surgery at the Children’s Hospital of Geneva. He has conducted his research program since 1995, in the time devoted to research activities in his hospital position, except for two years when he worked full time in fundamental research. He participates in both human hepatocyte and animal hepatocyte isolation and transplantation programs. From 1995 to 2000, with the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, he perfected the methods of isolating human and animal hepatocytes. He assessed the effect of hepatocyte transplantation in two animal models: acute hepatic insufficiency (AHI) and congenital enzyme deficiencies. He also worked for the development of animal hepatocyte cryopreservation and their in vitro examination. Further, he worked on the treatment of metabolic liver diseases by hepatocyte transplantation, and from 2001 he has been working on animal models to develop a clinically relevant protocol of liver ex vivo gene therapy.

Dr Loredana D'AMATO-SIZONENKO

MD, Swiss Orphanet Coordinator

Dr D'Amato Sizonenko is a geneticist specialized in rare diseases. She is presently Coordinator for Switzerland of Orphanet, an international database of information on rare diseases and orphan drugs for all publics, designed to contribute to the improvement of the diagnosis, care and treatment of patients with rare diseases.

Dr Celia DELOZIER-BLANCHET

PhD, Director of Clinical Services, University of California, USA

Dr Marisa JACONI

PhD, MER; University of Geneva, Switzerland

Dr Marisa Jaconi`s main research interest focuses on embryonic stem cell-based tissue engineering for the regeneration of the heart. The weight of her investigations are directed towards the mechanisms of cardiac cell differentiation (genetic control of cardiac differentiation and plasticity potential) from mouse and human embryonic stem (ES) cells. She has devoted much attention to the study of ES cells and new possible therapy of degenerative diseases that may be gained from scientific findings in this area. She is currently deriving new GMP-grade hESC lines from spare embryos in Switzerland for future clinical applications.

Prof Stanislas LYONNET

MD, PhD; Professor of Genetics, University of Paris - Hospital Necker, France

Pr. Stanislas Lyonnet is Professor of genetics at University Paris Descartes, and a clinical geneticists in the Department of Medical Genetics at Hôpital Necker-Enfants Malades. Pr Lyonnet trained in Pediatrics and Genetics and became Full Professor in the Department of Genetics, Paris Descartes Medical School, in 1995. As a principal investigator of an INSERM group ("Genetics and embryology of congenital malformations", within INSERM Unit U-781), Pr Lyonnet has conducted several studies aiming to localize and identify the genes involved in congenital malformation and inborn errors of development. Pr Lyonnet is responsible for the European Master of Genetics (Paris Descartes / Paris Diderot). He is a member of the INSERM Scientific Advisory Board, and has been a member of the board of the European Society of Human Genetics and its scientific program committee. Pr Lyonnet was also responsible for the Rare Disease Research Program in the frame of the French national agency for research (ANR). He is a section editor of the European Journal of Human Genetics, and sits on the editorial boards of Human Molecular Genetics and Clinical Dysmorphology. He was awarded the Research Price of INSERM in 2009.

Prof Martin MEULI

MD; Head of Department of Pediatric Surgery, University Hospital of Zurich, Switzerland

Prof Alexandre REYMOND

PhD; Lausanne University, Switzerland

Alexandre Reymond carried out his thesis in the laboratory of Dr. Viesturs Simanis at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) and received his Ph.D. from the University of Lausanne in 1993. After completion of his postdoctoral training with Dr Roger Brent in the Department of Molecular Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital and in the Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School in Boston, he moved to the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM) in Milan in 1998 to lead a research group. He joined in 2000 the Department of Genetic Medicine and Development, University of Geneva Medical School. He moved to the Center for Integrative Genomics in October 2004.

Dr Patrick SALMON

Pharm., PhD; University of Geneva, Switzerland

Patrick Salmon is a pharmaceutical doctor from Rene Descartes University in Paris. He received his PhD at the Pierre & Marie Curie University in Paris in 1991, studying immunology, virology and molecular biology. From 1993 to 1997, he studied developmental biology, gene expression and signal transduction at the University of California at Berkeley. Since 1997, he works at the Geneva School of Medicine where he is developing molecular tools based on lentivector technology. Since 2005, he is in charge of the Lentivector Lab in the Department of Neurosciences. The Lentivector Lab team is currently designing and producing lentivectors for basic research in neurosciences focusing on neural plasticity, as well as gene and cell therapy of neural disorders focusing on brain damage.

 

Prof Hamish S. SCOTT

PhD; Adelaide University, Australia

Professor Hamish Scott did his PhD (1992) and first post-doc at the Women's and Children's Hospital and the University of Adelaide.  He subsequently moved (1995) to the Division of Medical Genetics at the University of Geneva Medical School in Switzerland, accepting a faculty position in 1997, to work on the genetics and genomics of diseases that mapped to human chromosome 21, and Down syndrome. Relocating to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne in 2000, his laboratory focuses on the application of genetic and genomic technologies to the study of transcriptional mechanisms and molecular pathogenesis in autoimmunity and haematological malignancies. Since January 2008 he has been Deputy and then Head of the Department of Molecular Pathology at SA Pathology, the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science (IMVS), a member of the Hanson Institute and the Centre for Cancer Biology as well as an Affiliate Professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Adelaide.

 

Prof Etienne SOKAL

MD; Head of the Pediatric Gastroenterology - Hepatology Unit, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium

Professor Etienne Sokal is a pediatrician specialized in gastroenterology with 20 years experience in the field of pediatric hepatology and liver transplantation. He has taken an active part in the pediatric liver transplantation program, under the direction of Prof JB Otte, a world pioneer in pediatric liver transplantation, since this program was launched at Saint-Luc Clinics in the eighties. So far, more than 700 children have been transplanted and many foreign clinicians have also been trained in the field at Saint Luc Hospital. Pr Sokal is also the leader of a research team actively working on liver associated metabolic diseases in children with an extensive know-how in pediatric hepatology, infectious immunology and hepatic transplantation. The team is also specialized in in vitro manipulation of hepatic cells (culture, cryopreservation or cellular metabolism). More than 200 peer-reviewed publications demonstrate the level of excellence of the team, which is internationally recognized.  The recent breakthrough in liver stem cell technology has also positioned the team within the leaders in the field. Beside clinical activities and laboratory research, the centre has also conducted numerous pharmacological clinical researches thanks to a well-organized pediatric orientated clinical investigation centre.