11:05 Molecular biomarkers Patrick Tan* (pathologist, Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore)

Biography

Prof. Patrick Tan is Senior Vice Dean (Research) at Duke-NUS Medical School Singapore and Executive Director of PRECISE (Precision Health Research Singapore) coordinating Singapore’s National Precision Medicine program. He is also Chief Scientific Officer at the Genome Institute of Singapore, Senior Scientific Advisor (Group Research) at SingHealth and Professor (adjunct) at Duke University, USA. He received his B.A. (summa cum laude) from Harvard University and MD PhD degree from Stanford University, where he received the Charles Yanofsky prize. Other awards include the President’s Scholarship, Loke Cheng Kim scholarship, Young Scientist Award (A-STAR), Singapore Youth Award, Chen New Investigator Award (Human Genome Organization), President’s Science Award, Japanese Cancer Association International Award, Public Administration Medal (Silver), Exemplary Public Service Award, and NUS University Research Recognition Award. In 2018, he received the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Team Science Award as Team Leader. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and the Association of American Physicians (AAP), the Bioethics Advisory Committee (BAC), a Board Member of the International Gastric Cancer Association, Board of Editors for Science and Cancer Discovery, and on advisory committees for Qatar Precision Health Institute, and Riyadh Biotech City (Saudi Arabia).

Summary of presentation

Tumors are highly dynamic cellular ecosystems where cancer cells engage with other cell types such as immune cells and stromal tissues to promote carcinogenesis and invasion. Interactions between these tumor-resident populations are often sculpted by geospatial context, therapeutic pressure, and organ-site specific metastases. In this talk, I will present a few vignettes describing our attempts to apply spatial transcriptomic technologies to understand the spatial organization of gastric cancer, and how these insights improve our understanding of intra-tumor heterogeneity and mechanisms of gastric malignancy.