Dr. Gazourian gave a lecture on Before Symptoms: Redefining What’s Possible in Medicine Early Identification of Lung and Heart Diseases with AI

About Dr. Gazourian

Lee Gazourian, MD, MS is a pulmonary and critical care physician and the Director of the Lung Health Program at Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington, Massachusetts. He is also an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine.

Dr. Gazourian’s career has been defined by his work at the intersection of clinical care, research, and education. He completed his medical degree at Boston University School of Medicine, followed by residency and chief residency in internal medicine at Boston Medical Center, and fellowship training in pulmonary and critical care medicine through the Harvard Combined Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

His research focuses on leveraging qualitative and quantitative imaging and large clinical screening cohorts to better understand early markers of disease. As principal investigator on multiple industry- and foundation-funded studies, he has led efforts to examine interstitial lung abnormalities, emphysema, coronary artery calcification, and other imaging biomarkers as predictors of clinical outcomes.

An active educator and mentor, Dr. Gazourian has trained dozens of medical students, residents, and fellows, many of whom have gone on to academic and clinical leadership roles. At Lahey, he has pioneered innovative approaches to lung health, developing population-level screening and clinical pathways to identify high-risk patients earlier in the course of their disease.

Building on this work, Dr. Gazourian founded B4 Symptoms, Inc., whose mission is to translate research insights into scalable programs that support earlier detection and targeted referral. His overarching goal is to advance a proactive model of medicine—one that identifies disease sooner, delivers the right care at the right time, and improves outcomes for patients across health systems.

Dr. Herder spoke to a small group of faculty and Dreskin family members at a luncheon on CRISPR and Human Health: Past, Present, and Future.

About Dr. Herder

Dr. Rachel Herder serves as Vice President of Intellectual Property at Mammoth Biosciences, a firm that has done pioneering work in gene editing. Mammoth Biosciences is a biotechnology company focused on developing potential long-term curative therapies for patients with life-threatening and debilitating diseases. The company utilizes approaches that enable them to access difficult to reach tissues. It was founded by Jennifer Doudna who in 2020 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier for their discovery of programmable molecular scissors called CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). In less scientific terms, CRISPR refers to gene editing and encompasses a range of techniques. Since the 2012 Doudna/Charpentier publication, the field has exploded, opening the door for a variety of possibilities for human and planetary health ranging from agricultural applications, to detecting the COVID-19 virus, to the first FDA-approved gene edited cell therapy for Sickle Cell patients (CASGEVY®).  Dr. Herder will talk about the history of CRISPR technology, provide a brief explanation of the technology, and discuss areas of medicine where this has already worked and seems to be therapeutic. Dr. Herder is in a unique position to also discuss some of the ethical issues associated with CRISPR and gene editing and the implications for how this might impact the practice of medicine.  This talk aims to discuss the past, present, and future of CRISPR and human health. 

Rachel Herder is the Vice President of Intellectual Property at Mammoth Biosciences, a pre-clinical CRISPR gene editing biotech company co-founded by Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna.  Rachel has over a decade of experience in the gene editing space. Prior to Mammoth, Rachel was a law professor at Penn State and a patent attorney at a leading global law firm. She received her law degree and Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology & Genetics from the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Singh gave a lecture on Defining and Treating Long-COVID: An Ongoing Challenge and a Call to Action.

About Dr. Singh

Upinder Singh, MD, FIDSA is Professor in the Departments of Internal Medicine and Microbiology and Immunology and Division Chief of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Singh is an international expert in infectious diseases. She is both a basic and a clinical scientist. Her basic science research focuses on the molecular and genomic applications of parasitic diseases, including Entamoeba histolytica and free-living amebae, and she has made many significant contributions to this field. Her clinical research has focused on COVID-19 and Long-COVID.

Dr. Singh has contributed substantially to the leadership of large, national COVID treatment studies, and she led the Stanford hub for the NIH RECOVER study which examines the effects of Long-COVID. Dr. Singh led multiple investigator-initiated COVID-19 clinical trials. She established an outpatient COVID clinical trial research unit which initiated the first FDA approved clinical trial in April 2020 at a time when many were wary of bringing COVID patients into the health system, and she subsequently also established a monoclonal antibody infusion center. The Covid-19 studies at Stanford and the associated clinical data, epidemiological information, and biobanked samples have been leveraged to answer multiple aspects of COVID-19, including natural history, Long-COVID, diagnostics, and immune response. The research infrastructure that she established has facilitated the local and national studies of both clinical and basic pathophysiological aspects of COVID-19.  At a national level Dr. Singh has conducted multiple clinical trials for patients with mild/moderate COVID-19 including treatment with antivirals (ACTIV-2 program and involved in program leadership), treatment with repurposed compounds (ACTIV-6 program), a study defining the prevalence and pathophysiology of post-acute sequelae (PASC) of COVID, and the first global trial on the use of Paxlovid for the treatment of Long-COVID (STOP-PASC clinical trial). Dr. Singh has gained substantial experience in treating patients with COVID and helped establish a Long-Covid clinic which began to see patients in May 2021.

Dr. Gevaert gave a lecture on Functional Precision Oncology:  New Information to Inform Cancer Therapy Selection.

About Dr. Gevaert

Dr. Matthew (Matt) Gevaert is the Chief Executive Officer, a Co-Founder and a Board Member of Kiyatec, Inc. Under Matt’s leadership Kiyatec is disrupting cancer therapy selection with patient-specific prediction of response to drug therapies, prior to treatment. Kiyatec achieves this by measuring the response of individual patient live cancer cells with its innovative 3D cell culture technology platform, with success demonstrated in peer-reviewed publications for multiple tumor types that score >95th percentile in on-line impact. Through a dedicated focus on direct relevance to cancer patients, Kiyatec has successfully attracted multiple rounds of private sector investment, developed its 3D PredictTM and KIYA-PredictTM ex vivo 3D cell culture platforms, and published the first functional precision oncology assay with clinically-correlated prospective predictive therapeutic response evidence in multiple tumor types. To-date, Kiyatec has been awarded more than $5M of competitively awarded federal funding including contracts from the National Cancer Institute, cultivated clinical collaborations at leading national cancer institutions and built productive relationships with premier biopharmaceutical companies developing the cancer therapies of the future. 

Matt is a graduate of the University of Waterloo (B.Sc., Chemistry) and of Clemson University (M.S. and Ph.D., Bioengineering). He serves on a number of professional and community boards and occasionally teaches an MBA graduate course in technology entrepreneurship for professional business students. 

Dr. Chiriva Internati gave a lecture on Diamond CancerSplice: Where Artificial Intelligence Meets Cancer Immunotherapy."

About Dr. Maurizio Chiriva-Internati

Dr. Chiriva Internati has been an Associate Professor at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas since August 2019. Prior to that, he served as an Associate Professor at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center from September 2013 to June 2017. His research has led to the identification of novel cancer-testis antigens for the development of immunotherapeutic strategies against solid and non-solid tumors. This led to the development of the bioinformatic software Diamond CancerSplice, which is a key core platform of our company, leading to the discovery and prioritization of isoform antigens via insilico system.

Dr. Chiriva-Internati earned a PhD in Immunology from the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. He also earned a PhD in Morphological Science from the Universit`a degli Studi di Milano, Italy, and a Doctoral Degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Milan, Italy. Dr. Chiriva- Internati was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Immunology at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, earned a certificate in Artificial Intelligence from MIT Sloan School of Management and earned a certificate in Financial Technology from Oxford Sa¨ıd Business School.

Dr. Sarah Hallberg gave a lecture on Reversing Type 2 Diabetes called Change the Paradigm and Change Lives.

About Dr. Sarah Hallberg

Sarah Hallberg, DO, MS is the Medical Director at Virta Health, the first clinically-proven treatment to safely and sustainably reverse type 2 diabetes without medications or surgery.

As a physician and exercise physiologist with a passion for helping people be healthy through diet and exercise, she is responsible for providing medical supervision to Virta's expert team of physicians and oversees the clinical strategy for Virta Clinic participants.

Before joining Virta, Dr. Hallberg founded Indiana University Arnett's Medically Supervised Weight Loss Program where she still serves as Medical Director. Her clinic served as the host for Virta's clinical trial.

Dr. Hallberg is an expert in diabetes care and is board certified in Internal Medicine, Obesity Medicine, and Clinical Lipidology.  Dr. Hallberg is also the Chair of the Scientific Advisor Board and the Board of Directors of The Nutrition Coalition, a nonprofit organization that aims to educate the public and policymakers about the need to strengthen national nutrition policy so that it is founded upon a comprehensive body of conclusive science, and where that science is absent, to encourage research.

A low-carb enthusiast, Dr. Hallberg practices what she preaches by living a ketogenic lifestyle.  Her TEDx Talk, "Reversing Type 2 Diabetes Starts with Ignoring the Guidelines," has been viewed more than 3 million times.

Dr. Patrick McBride gave a lecture on the importance of self-care called Taking Care of Your Heart: An Update in Heart Disease Prevention.

About Dr. Patrick McBride

Dr. McBride is a professor in the Department of Medicine's section of cardiovascular medicine and the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, where he also served as Associate Dean for Students.  Dr. McBride also co-directs the UW Hospital and Clinics' Preventive Cardiology program, with more than 30 professional staff, an inpatient and outpatient cardiac rehabilitation program, a preventive cardiology/cholesterol clinic and other clinical initiatives for people at risk for cardiovascular disease.

Dr. McBride has served on several national guideline panels including the National Cholesterol Education Program's (NCEP) Children and Adolescent Treatment Panel, the AAMC Obesity Panel, the AHRQ Cardiac Rehabilitation Expert Panel, and the NIH-NCEP's Adult Treatment Panel III and IV. 

With his primary research focus in preventive cardiology, cholesterol treatment and the quality of cardiovascular disease prevention in practice, Dr. McBride has authored or co-authored more than 150 publications.  Dr. McBride is a leader in developing and implementing statewide teaching programs for health care professionals on heart disease prevention, cholesterol, and quality.

Ian Crozier, M.D., gave a compelling presentation about his experiences as both a physician for ebola patients and an ebola survivor himself. 

About Dr. Ian Crozier

Dr. Ian Crozier is a Vanderbilt-trained infectious diseases specialist originally from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Over the past six years, primarily at the Infectious Diseases Institute (Kampala, Uganda), his work has focused on developing clinical reasoning skills in African clinicians providing complex care at African bedsides.

In August 2014, he was deployed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to the Kenema Government Hospital Ebola Treatment Unit in eastern Sierra Leone, a ground-zero setting for the Sierra Leone outbreak. After becoming infected, he was evacuated to Emory University Hospital, becoming critically ill, but emerging after a six-week hospitalization. Two months after clearing the virus from his blood he developed sight-threatening ocular inflammation with high amounts of viable Ebola virus detected in the eye, this in addition to a long list of other post-Ebola virus disease sequelae. He has been called one of the sickest Ebola survivors ever, and provides a unique perspective from a dual citizenship as Ebola doctor and Ebola survivor.

Currently, he serves a three-country technical role at WHO, focused on characterizing and understanding the sequelae of Ebola virus disease in West African survivors, targeting their clinical care needs, the management of residual risk and the scientific questions newly emerging at survivors’ bedsides.

Stephen Dreskin, M.D., Ph.D., was the inaugural speaker for the Dreskin Distinguished Lectureship at the USC School of Medicine Greenville.

Dr. Dreskin’s lecture addressed food allergies, their epidemiology and immune system pathophysiology as well as current approaches to diagnosis and management.

About Stephen Dreskin, M.D., Ph.D

Stephen C. Dreskin, M.D., Ph.D. is a professor of Medicine and Immunology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine-Denver and medical director of the University of Colorado Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology Practice at the University of Colorado School of Medicine-Denver.

In addition, he is active in many national organizations. Currently, he is the chair of the Practice, Diagnostics, and Therapeutics (PDT) Committee of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (AAAAI) and chair of the Plenary Workgroup for the 2016 AAAAI annual meeting. He also serves on the board of directors of the American Board of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

Dr. Dreskin grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, earned a B.A. degree from the University of Pennsylvania and received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Emory University. This was followed by a residency in Internal Medicine at the University of California Davis, Sacramento Medical Center and a fellowship in Allergy and Clinical Immunology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health.

His primary research interest is the study of functional IgE-allergen interactions as they pertain to food allergies. In work funded by the National Institutes of Health and other sources, his laboratory has established that 2 small allergens, Ara h 2 and Ara h 6 are the major peanut allergens. Current efforts are directed at how these proteins cross-link IgE on mast cells to initiate the allergic response.

Dr. Dreskin’s primary clinical interest is the treatment of chronic urticaria and angioedema. He has written numerous clinical reviews on this topic and is the current author of the chapter on Chronic Urticaria and Angioedema for Goldman’s Cecil Medicine Textbook (24th ed).