Catriona Jamieson, MD, PhD

Catriona Jamieson, MD, PhD is a leading physician-scientist in the cancer stem cell biology field. She is a Professor of Medicine, the Koman Family Presidential Endowed Chair in Cancer Research, Deputy Director of the Moores Cancer Center and the Director of the Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center at the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego). Dr. Jamieson is the Director of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) Alpha Stem Cell Clinic at UCSD, which provides infrastructure to accelerate the bench to bedside development and implementation of cancer stem cell targeted and cellular immunotherapy trials for hematologic and other malignancies. Dr. Jamieson discovered malignant reprogramming, RNA hyper-editing and splice isoform switching as mechanisms governing human pre-cancer stem cell generation and cancer stem cell maintenance in selective niches. This pioneering cancer stem cell research has informed the developed of cancer stem cell targeted therapies, including JAK2 and sonic hedgehog inhibitor trials, which resulted in two FDA approvals for myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs)
and leukemia. Dr. Jamieson’s research focuses on developing novel diagnostic and therapeutic strategies to obviate initiation, progression and therapeutic resistance of myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), MPNs and hematologic malignancies, including secondary acute myeloid leukemia.

John Hood, PhD

John Hood, PhD came to San Diego in 1998 for post-doctoral research at The Scripps Research Institute and has been actively starting biotechnology companies here since 2001. He is currently the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Endeavor Biomedicines. Prior to that he was the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Impact Biomedicines, a company that was acquired by Celgene in 2018 in order to gain rights to fedratinib, which was approved for treatment of myelofibrosis in 2019.  Prior to founding Impact, Dr. Hood was the Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Wintherix (now Samumed). Prior to that, Dr. Hood was Director of Research and co-inventor of fedratinib at TargeGen, Inc., (subsequently acquired by Sanofi SA), where he led a team identifying small molecule kinase inhibitors for the treatment of eye diseases and cancer. He is an inventor on 100+ patents and author on 50+ scientific articles. Dr. Hood obtained a PhD in medical sciences and BS in biochemistry from Texas A&M University.