Global Speakers

Dr. Liu is currently the Deputy Executive Director and Senior Group Leader (Human Genetics) at the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS). Dr. Liu got his PhD on quantitative genetics at the Duke University and did his postdoctoral training in the genetics of psychiatric disorders at the Columbia University.

Dr Liu’s main research interest is to understand the genetic basis of human inheritance and disease susceptibility.  Focusing on Asian populations, he pursues collaborative research to discover genetic variants that influence disease susceptibility, progression and treatment outcome by employing both candidate gene-based and genome-wide association analyses. His research covers diverse disease phenotypes, including cancers, autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, neurological and psychiatric disorders, cardiovascular diseasses, and infectious diseases and has led to the discovery of many novel susceptibility genes for human diseases and more recently treatment outcome. In addition, because the extent and distribution of disease predisposing genetic variation in human population is the result of a long and complicated evolutionary, migratory, and demographic history, he is also interested in investigating population processes affecting genetic variations in modern human populations. Such population genetics research can not only improve the understanding of the population structure of modern Human populations, but also further facilitate studies of complex diseases.   Recently, Dr Liu’s research is focusing more on large-scale whole genome sequencing studies where large-scale genomic data are being explored for the improvement of clinical and healthcare services, such as various Precision Medicine programs around the world.

Sonia Davila completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Spain. The theme of her PhD thesis was “Molecular Genetics of inherited cystic kidney diseases”. Using a combination of linkage approaches and Sanger sequencing she identified new mutations in genes causing Autosomal dominant polycystic disease present only in Spanish families. Upon graduation she moved to Yale University (2001), to work with Prof Stephan Somlo on a subset of families diagnosed with a cystic disease affecting the liver. During those years she participated actively on the identification of two human genes causing Polycystic Liver Disease (PLD).

In 2004 she joined the Genome Institute of Singapore as a postdoctoral fellow on nephrogenomics, She was promoted to Research Scientist on 2007 and to Principal Investigator on 2010. Her work focused on human genetic susceptibility to infectious diseases. During that time she published several reports on new genetic variants associated to genetic susceptibility to meningococcal disease, Kawasaki disease, pulmonary tuberculosis and Dengue. Over the last two years she’s been also working on rare disorders, using NGS approaches to identify mutations in unique patients.

Her current work at SingHealth Duke-NUS Institute of Precision Medicine (PRISM) aims to implement Precision Medicine in a clinical setting. Sonia is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Duke-NUS and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College London.

Dr. Allen Lai is now the senior vice president of ACT Genomics Singapore, strategizing corporate development, planning and execution of cancer genomics clinical & research projects in Southeast Asia. Allen has been frequently invited to speak on the topic of precision medicine in regional high level conferences such as Financial Times Healthcare Summit, International Conference in Cancer Control. He holds several high key profile roles as Advisor Board of ISPOR (International Society for Pharmacoecnomics and Outcomes Research) Asia Consortium, former President of ISPOR Singapore and concurrently Senior Consultant, Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. and MPA, from Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, M.Sc. (Preventive Medicine) from National Taiwan University and M.D. from Chung Shan Medical Dental University, Taiwan. He was the principal consultant at IMS Health Asia, and the director of Institute of Health Economics & Management and the academic director of MSc Management of Health Industries in ESSEC Business School.

Dr  Bertil  Lindmark  is  Chief  Medical  Officer   of ASLAN   Pharmaceuticals. In his most recent position as Executive Director of Research and Development and Member of the Board of Directors at Almirall, a European pharmaceutical company with global reach, he led the global R&D team of more than 500 R&D staff across three sites, focusing on respiratory, gastrointestinal, dermatology and neuroscience. He  secured  EU and  US approval of several important new drugs, including Eklira/Tudorza, Constella and  Eklira/formoterol, and was instrumental in the USD$2bn sale of Almirall’s respiratory franchise to AstraZeneca.

Prior to Almirall, Bertil was VP at AstraZeneca, leading global clinical development in Respiratory  and Inflammation, notably securing the global approval  of Symbicort Turbuhaler. He also served as VP and Head of Clinical Development at AstraZeneca Japan R&D leading 170 staff. During his career, Bertil has been responsible for the global approval of 10 drugs, with sales exceeding USD$4bn across three compounds into man.

Bertil holds a MD degree and PhD in Molecular Epidemiology from the University of Lund, and specialist qualification in Internal Medicine and in Gastroenterology.

Pierce Chow is an academic surgeon and Professor at the Duke-NUS Medical School. He is concurrently Senior Consultant Surgeon at the National Cancer Centre Singapore and the Singapore General Hospital, NMRC Senior Clinician Scientist and Adjunct Faculty at the Genome Institute of Singapore. He trained in Liver Transplantation with Professor Russell Strong in Australia. In 1998, he co-founded the Asia-Pacific Hepatocellular Carcinoma (AHCC) Trials Group and has been the protocol chair of 5 multi-centre clinical trials that have involved more than 30 centres in 14 countries. He was conferred the NMRC National Outstanding Clinician Scientist Award for improving clinical outcomes with his research on Liver Cancer in 2012.

Prof Chow was awarded him the NMRC grant for the Translational and Clinical Research (TCR) Flagship Programme in Liver Cancer in 2016.  Building on positive results of earlier genetic and immunology studies in surgically resected HCC, Prof Chow now leads a multi-national study on how genomic heterogeneity and the immune micro-environment in HCC impact clinical outcomes. The Programme will identify clonally dominant drivers, bring precision medicine to individuals with HCC and initiate new multi-national clinical studies across the Asia Pacific to advance treatment strategies for HCC.

Vincenzo has more than 25 years global experience of drug development within major pharmaceutical companies as Wellcome, Glaxo-Wellcome, GSK, Novartis and Roche in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

He has held a number of positions such as Clinical Medical Expert, Head of Drug Surveillance, Head of Phase II-IV Clinical Research and Head of Early Development & Clinical Pharmacology for Asia Pacific. Through these roles he has gained an extensive and deep knowledge of all phases of clinical drug development in multiple therapeutic areas including cardiovascular, liver, lung diseases, neurosciences, virology and oncology, as well as clinical pharmacology, drug safety/pharmaco-vigilance and biomarker strategy in early clinical trials.

Vincenzo received his medical degree, as well his Lung Disease and Internal Medicine specialist qualifications from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. He has published scientific papers in major journals and presented at numerous conferences as well as being the co-author of book chapters and named inventor on patent applications.

He is a member of: the Physicians-Surgeons and Dentists Association of Rome, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

Started in a humble background in India and went up the ladder by hard work & dedication, Vikash is a talented Chartered Accountant having over 1.5 decades of experience in diverse businesses such as FMCG, Agri Trading and Medical Devices as well as and companies like J&J, BP and BAT. Vikash is a passionate leader with a mission to transform finance & enabling the engines of development of Business, People and Community at large.  As a deep believer in culture, values and ethos of various societies, Vikash believes in doing things by putting the best foot forward as a Team and is never tired of doing things differently and taking up challenging agenda.

Multiple award winner for various business & finance projects (Tax Optimization, Business Model Structuring, JV / Startups, Global Policy) and part of Regional CFO Forums in Singapore. Currently leading finance for South Asia and Developed Markets, Asia for Vision Care business of Johnson and Johnson and also heading finance for Regional BU of newly acquired Eye Care Solutions vertical.

Pauline Ng is a seasoned pioneer in precision medicine with 15 years of experience and over 12,000 citations for her publications. With distinguished achievements in research, industry, and clinical settings, her breadth and depth is unparalleled. Her research accomplishments include characterizing the first personal human genome as an Assistant Professor at the J. Craig Venter Institute. She published a critical assessment of 23andMe’s direct-to-consumer personalized genetic test in Nature, as well as an article comparing next-generation sequencing technologies which was one of the year’s most-viewed articles in Genome Biology. Dr. Ng left her mark on industry during her tenure at Illumina, where she designed the content of the HumanHap BeadChips. Thanks to her superior design and on-time delivery, the product outperformed the competition and now accounts for the majority of genome-wide association studies. Dr. Ng also shaped the clinical landscape of Southeast Asia as a Group Leader at the Genome Institute of Singapore and the CIO of the POLARIS program. POLARIS was the first laboratory in Southeast Asia to be clinically certified for next-generation sequencing assays.

Her research interests include disease mutations, health trends in social media, and promoting open access to scientific literature. Dr. Ng received her PhD from the University of Washington. Her PhD thesis was the SIFT algorithm, which has been adopted by more than 100 pharma and biotech companies and is a staple algorithm for genetic disease. Dr. Ng is currently consulting.

Sanjeev Kumar is an Industry Manager with the Healthcare Practice at Frost & Sullivan, Asia Pacific and has over nine years of consulting and analytics expertise, including research in areas such as pharmaceutical industry overview, therapeutic area research and diagnostic market research. His consulting expertise covers market intelligence, competitor analysis, market entry and distribution strategy.

He is sought after for his technical expertise base covering the key healthcare sectors from pharmaceuticals and biotechnology to clinical and molecular diagnostics matched by a strong background in statistical expertise and business intelligence. In addition, he has developed custom research in healthcare areas such as Clinical Trials, CRO CMO, Therapeutic Area research, Regenerative Medicine and Clinical Diagnostics.

Key projects he has worked on include Analysis of the Global & APAC Clinical trials and CRO Industry, Global CMO, Biologics Outsourcing market, Generics and Biosimilars and Immunochemistry Market. Research on therapeutic area such as Oncology, Diabetes and neurology.

He holds a Master of Business (Marketing) and a Bachelor of Pharmacy.

Owen Schaefer is a Research Assistant Professor at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore. He received his DPhil in Philosophy from Oxford University, and has completed fellowships at the National Institutes of Health’s Department of Bioethics and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. His primary interests lie on the ethics of developing novel biomedical technologies.  He has written on ethical issues related to topics such as human subjects research, gene testing and editing, IVF (including mitochondrial replacement), and human enhancement.  He is also currently serving as a Global Future Councils Fellow for the Council on the Future of Technology, Values and Policy, an initiative of the World Economic Forum.

My research interests lie broadly around the sociopolitical, ethical and regulatory issues surrounding stem cell innovation, regenerative medicines, precision medicine, genomics and reproductive technologies. I have expertise in empirical bioethics and experience in using both qualitative and quantitative research methods to inform normative questions pertaining to emergent biotechnologies and the biomedical sciences. I have worked on policy issues with the Committee for Ethics, Law and Society of the Human Genome Organisation, the Technical Working Group on Ethics at the World Health Organization, the Singapore Ministry of Health and Bioethics Advisory Committee. I am currently an Assistant Professor and Phase Director of the Health Ethics, Law and Professionalism (HeLP) Programme at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore. I hold multiple grants on projects examining the ethics and regulation of innovative stem cell-based therapies, and have research interests in governance issues surrounding the return of incidental findings and data sharing in precision medicine.

Dr. R. Ryanne Wu is an Internal Medicine physician and Health Services researcher with a focus on Implementation Science methodologies.

She holds joint appointments as Assistant Professor in the Signature Program in Health Services and Systems Research at Duke-NUS Medical School and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Duke University in the United States.  Dr. Wu completed her medical degree at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, residency at Georgetown University, and fellowship in Internal Medicine and Health Services research at Duke University.  Dr. Wu’s main research interest is risk stratification and risk counselling within medical care to improve tailoring of prevention, screening, and treatment strategies to the individual patient.  She is a member of the Center for Applied Genomics and Precision Medicine at Duke University and the Center for Precision Medicine (PRISM) at Duke-NUS Medical School.  She has been involved in the development and implementation of a family health history-based risk stratification tool, MeTree, in healthcare systems across the United States.  She is currently evaluating the implementation of MeTree within the Singapore and exploring the intersection between family health history and genomic data.

Kian Hoe is a Patent Attorney at Davies Collison Cave Asia Pte Ltd. He specializes in the preparation and prosecution of patent applications in the areas of life sciences, molecular biology, biotechnology, stem cell technology and protein engineering. Kian Hoe graduated from the Imperial College London in Biochemistry and completed his postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge with a PhD in Protein Engineering. He was funded by the National Science (BS-PhD) Scholarship from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) for his studies. Kian Hoe was also a research fellow at the p53lab, A*STAR, where he worked on understanding the mechanisms of drug–induced apoptosis in acute myeloid leukaemia. He was also concurrently involved in a number of antibody development projects.

Kian Hoe is a registered Singapore Patent Attorney and is a member of the Association of Singapore Patent Attorneys (ASPA). He is also an adjunct lecturer at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine.

Dr Saumya Jamuar is a Consultant in the Genetics Service at KKH and co-founder of Global Gene Corp, a genomics data company, and serves as the Clinical Lead of the Institute of Precision Medicine, Duke-NUS and Singapore Childhood Undiagnosed Disease Programme. He completed his Genetics Fellowship at the Harvard Medical School Genetics Training Program and worked as a post-doctoral fellow in Christopher A Walsh lab in Harvard Medical School from January 2012- December 2013. He is actively involved in research and has presented at both local and international meetings. His research areas include genetic disorders, dysmorphology, skeletal dysplasia, and neurodevelopmental genetics. He was awarded the Young Investigator Award at the American Epilepsy Society meeting and is the recipient of the 2015 Singhealth Outstanding Young Researcher Award. Dr Saumya Jamuar is a Consultant in the Genetics Service at KKH and co-founder of Global Gene Corp, a genomics data company, and serves as the Clinical Lead of the Institute of Precision Medicine, Duke-NUS and Singapore Childhood Undiagnosed Disease Programme. He completed his Genetics Fellowship at the Harvard Medical School Genetics Training Program and worked as a post-doctoral fellow in Christopher A Walsh lab in Harvard Medical School from January 2012- December 2013. He is actively involved in research and has presented at both local and international meetings. His research areas include genetic disorders, dysmorphology, skeletal dysplasia, and neurodevelopmental genetics. He was awarded the Young Investigator Award at the American Epilepsy Society meeting and is the recipient of the 2015 Singhealth Outstanding Young Researcher Award.

John Yoon is currently serving as Director Asia Pacific for Joint Commission International. In this capacity, he is responsible for development of relationships between JCI and Asia-Pacific health care organizations, governments and industry clients in their efforts to reduce risk and improve health outcomes.

Prior to this, John served as Director of Solutions and Philips Capital at Philips Healthcare Asia Pacific office in Singapore managing large scale hospital projects, capital asset financing and turnkey equipment solutions to healthcare organizations.

Previously, he was hospital administrator and worked as General Manager at Mubadala Development Company in Abu Dhabi managing a multi-specialty orthopedic and rehabilitation hospital. He also served as Director of International Business at a large privately-owned health system in Korea specializing in spine and orthopedics disease management where he led the organization’s first JCI accreditation.

He graduated with degree in business administration from Korea University in Korea and holds MBA from International Institute for Management Development (IMD) Business School in Switzerland. He serves as key opinion leader and consultant for Korea Ministry of Health and Welfare.

Dr. Folefac Aminkeng is an Assistant Principal Investigator and the Associate Head of the Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine Program at A*STAR. His research focuses on the “Pharrmacogenomics of Adverse Drug Reactions”. He trained at the University of British Columbia in Pharmacogenomics and Precision Medicine and was part of the Canadian Pharmacogenomics Network for Drug Safety, an active surveillance and Pharmacogenomics Consortium for studying adverse drug reactions in the Canadian Health Care system. He has made significant contributions to the field of pharmacogenomics including the identification of a gene that is involved in cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure after cancer treatment (Aminkeng F et al, Nature Genetics. 2015 Sep; 47(9):1079-84.). He is the recipient of a number of fellowships including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research and the British Columbia Children Hospital Research Institute Bertram Hoffmeister Postdoctoral Fellowships. He has also been recognized for a distinguish academic and scientific career through a number of career awards including the Canadian Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics Boehringer Ingelheim Postdoctoral Award in Pharmacology, the British Columbia Children Hospital Research Institute award for outstanding achievement by a postdoctoral fellow, the Golden Helix Top Prize and the Canadian Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics Publication Award. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Population Therapeutics and Clinical Pharmacology and is a member of the Canadian Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics Scientific Program Committee.

Dr Marie Loh is the Principal Investigator of the Integrative Omics group at the Translational Laboratory in Genetic Medicine (TLGM), A*STAR and Research Assistant Professor at NUS. Her basic training was in Statistics and Bioinformatics, and she obtained her PhD in Pharmacogenetics before her postdoc at University of Oulu and Imperial College London. She has a specific interest in diseases and phenotypes exhibiting ethnic differences in risk and outcome such as cardiometabolic diseases, and the role of DNA methylation in accounting for these differences.

Dr Michael D Winther is Associate Director at the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) and Head of Office of Strategic Alliances and Knowledge Management as of December 2015.  Responsible for all agreements with academic, medical and industry organizations, as well as intellectual property developed by GIS.  He is also the Senior Project Manager for the national pharmacogenomics project SAPhIRE: Surveillance and Pharmacogenomics of Adverse Drug Reactions (www.saphire.sg).  The SAPhIRE programme is developing the knowledgebase and tools needed to implement pharmacogenomics at the wider community level to impact safety and efficacy of biological and small molecule therapeutics.  He has over 25 years R&D experience in biologicals and drug discovery with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and academia.

Sumanth provides strategy and operations consulting services to pharmaceutical companies, healthcare institutions, governments, medical technology and digital health companies in Asia. He specialises in the areas of growth strategy, go-to-market strategy, commercial strategy and new technology/adjacency assessments.  His experience spans multiple therapy area analyses including oncology, immunology, infectious diseases and non-communicable diseases He has contributed to industry journals such asScrip, European Biopharmaceutical Review (EBR) and Contract Pharma and presented at events such as Biopharma Congress Asia (Singapore, 2010) and ViB events Biosimilars Congress(Brussels, 2008).

Rachel leads the development of growth strategies for multi-national, research-based pharmaceutical companies.

Based in Singapore, working across the Asia-Pacific region, she specialises in pricing and market access, and commercial strategy.

Rachel delivers impact by enabling patients to access new innovative medicines.

Rachel works across a range of diseases with experience in Hepatitis, Respiratory, Oncology, CVD & Metabolic, Neurodegenerative, and Antimicrobial Resistance, where she is a published author.

Rachel worked in London on Pharmaceutical strategy for several years before moving to SE Asia. In her earlier career she was a Senior Policy Advisor in the UK Government on health and economic issues.

Dr. Neerja Karnani is a Senior Principal Investigator and Systems Biology Lead at Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences (SICS), A*STAR. Her research group runs a discovery based platform to identify diagnostic markers and interventions related to suboptimal mother-offspring health outcomes and disease risk. She has been using multi-omics approaches (genetics, epigenetics, transcriptomics, metagenomics and metabolomics) and integrating the big data to develop better insights into metabolic diseases (Gestational diabetes and child obesity), micronutrient deficiencies, maternal mood adversities and child socio-emotional development. She is an active member and science strategy developer for three Singaporean cohorts, GUSTO (pregnancy and child development), S-PRESTO (pre-conception), and NiPPeR (pregnancy intervention study in partnership with Nestle). She is also a key member of the Science Management Group (SMG) for EpiGen consortium, a collaborative research network between 5 institutions across 3 countries (Singapore, New Zealand and UK) to study developmental origins of health and disease.  Her group’s research findings have attracted major nutrition, pharma and diagnostic industries and fostered translational programs and funding from these commercial organizations at both individual and institutional level. She is also a contributor to the Singapore’s National Precision Medicine program that aims at population risk stratification for bringing precision to diagnosis and intervention.

Dr Quin Wills is an experienced genomicist at the interdisciplinary interface of cellular genetics, with qualifications in medicine, mathematics, computational biology, and statistical genomics. Having previously co-founded a drug genomics CRO, and now leading a target discovery department, he has experience in both experimental, computational, and translational genomic science in the precision medicine space. Quin has taught a wide range of international courses in genomics and bioinformatics.

In addition to developing and supervising genomic software, Quin developed and lectured a series of R-based courses from exploratory data visualisation through to high throughput techniques and performance computing, aimed at multidisciplinary researchers.

Others: Developed and taught a workshop in `multi-scale biology’, University of British Columbia. Taught `statistics for genomics’, MIT. Co-developed and taught `introductory metabonomics’ workshop at the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Guest seminars on computational biology at the Cambridge Computational Biology Institute. Conceived and led `biological data analysis and informatics’ workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. I’ve also consulted for the South African regional innovation agency on the development of a national competitive bioinformatics strategy.

Dr Poon Song Ling received her Ph.D. degree from the University of British Columbia in Canada. Subsequently, she joined National Cancer Centre Singapore to conduct her postdoctoral training in translational research. Her principal research interests circumscribe the topic of genetic instability in cancer cells. She seeks to utilize next generation sequencing in conjunction with high throughput screening to elucidate the roles of aberrant signaling pathways in cancer cell biology for the development of cancer therapeutics. She has published widely in leading journals including Nature Genetics, Science Translational Medicine, and Cancer Discovery. Currently, Dr. Poon is the medical scientific liaison of ACT Genomics.

Dr. Liisa Nairismagi received her PhD degree in molecular biology from Aarhus University, Denmark. She then joined National Cancer Centre Singapore to conduct her postdoctoral training in translational research by initially studying the genetics of solid tumors. Subsequently, she was involved in the establishment of the Lymphoma Genomic Translational Research Laboratory that aims to molecularly profile T and NK cell lymphomas and to translate the findings into clinical care. With a strong background in cell biology and cancer genetics, Dr. Liisa’s main interest is to use next-generation sequencing to guide patient’s treatment. She is currently the medical science liaison of ACT Genomics.

Devan brings together strong training and experience in Chemistry/Life Sciences, Computer Science/Computational Biology and Corporate Finance to commercialize medical technologies.

His current focus at ETPL is on developing and commercialising Digital Health solutions that leverage on big data and deep learning algorithms.

Before taking on this role, Devan served Singapore based startups and SMEs over 5 years in various leadership roles most recently as Chief Medical Officer at Advanced First Aid Research focusing on burn wound care.

He graduated with a Master’s degree in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, a Master’s Degree in Knowledge Engineering from NUS on AI and Machine learning, an MBA in Finance from SP Jain Singapore, and a PhD in Chemistry from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry Gottingen Germany.

Before he took the plunge into startups, and commercializing data intensive digital health technology, he conducted scientific research at A*STAR, and at MIT as part of SMART.

His interests are centred around new models to monetize and derive value from bits, bytes, atoms, molecules and systems particularly in life sciences.

Vincent Quah is responsible for business development with education institutions, research and not-for-profit organizations.  He works with educators and students, research scientists and non-for-profit personnel in leveraging AWS Cloud services to save costs, accelerate innovation, and increase organizational agility that better serve their missions.

Based in Singapore, Vincent Quah has more than 25 years of experience working in senior roles across the education (K12 and tertiary) and learning sectors, life sciences and healthcare industries, as well as high performance computing projects across Asia Pacific.