Speakers

Amanda Bartels

Amanda lives in Calgary with her family and is a wife and mom to one daughter. She has Cystic Fibrosis and was one of the patients who received Trikafta on compassionate access nearly three years ago. She went from watching her life from the sidelines to becoming an active participant in her and her family's lives. She is the lead volunteer advocate for Alberta and was part of the team that helped educate Albertan decision makers about living with CF and the need for broad and fast access to new drugs like Trikafta.

Dr. Anne Stephenson

Dr. Stephenson is an Associate Professor and Clinician Scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She obtained her MD as well as a PhD in Clinical Epidemiology from the University of Toronto. She has been caring for adults living with CF at the Adult CF Clinic at St. Michael's Hospital since 2001 and has been the Medical Director of the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Registry since 2008. Her research involves population-based studies using national CF Registry data within Canada and internationally. 

Anne Marie Wright

Driven by a strong vision to make an impactful difference across the healthcare community, Anne Marie is President of Elements Strategy Inc., a strategic consultancy providing services to the healthcare industry where transformation through patient centered innovation is critical to success.

She is also the Co Founder of YouAreUNLTD , an advisory and communications group, working with

diverse organizations to identify potential, unlock opportunity and confront the challenges of a global

aging society and longevity.

With over 30 years as a senior executive in private, public and not for profit healthcare organizations,

Anne Marie is a champion of innovation and “next level” growth to build organizational value.

Educated in business management at Queen’s University, Anne Marie is a lifelong learner, continuing her education through extensive executive development and leadership programs. Throughout her life, she has also been an active volunteer in the healthcare field, including most recently, healthcare innovation and research networks.

Dr. Charles Deber

Dr. Charles Deber is a Senior Scientist in the Program in Molecular Medicine in the Research Institute at the Hospital for Sick Children, and a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. Dr. Deber’s research focuses on studies of both natural and designed hydrophobic peptides and proteins to understand how their amino acid composition and sequence affect how they (and the structures they form) interact with membranes. As one application of this work, the Deber lab has developed a new category of membrane-active antimicrobial peptides that are destructive to bacterial biofilms such as those that affect patients with cystic fibrosis.

Dr. Christina Thornton

Christina Thornton, MD PhD FRCPC is an adult respirologist in the Division of Respirology, Departments of Medicine and Microbiology, Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Calgary, Canada. Dr. Thornton is a clinician scientist specializing in cystic fibrosis and bronchiectasis. She completed the MD/PhD program at the University of Calgary as part of the Leaders in Medicine program. Her PhD thesis looked at the lower respiratory microbiome and microbial interactions in cystic fibrosis patients under the supervision of Dr. Michael Surette. She completed her internal medicine residency followed by respirology fellowship at the University of Calgary in 2021. Dr. Thornton then went on to the University of Michigan where she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in advanced microbiome community analysis in cystic fibrosis patients with Drs. John LiPuma and Lindsay Caverly. She is now an assistant professor as of Aug 2022 at the University of Calgary. Dr. Thornton runs a research lab with the key interests around the role of polymicrobial infections at times of clinical stability and pulmonary exacerbation in suppurative lung disease in a directly translational application to persons with CF. Finally, she is interested to apply lessons learned from CF towards other suppurative lung disease including bronchiectasis.

Dr. David Nichols

Dr. David Nichols, MD is an affiliate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington, USA. He is board certified in Pediatrics, Internal Medicine, and Pediatric Pulmonary Medicine. He has held academic posts and leadership positions at the Colorado Adult CF Program at National Jewish Health and the Pediatric CF Program at Seattle Children’s Hospital. In these positions, Dr. Nichols helped to develop and lead multiple national clinical trials in CF, served on key oversight committees for CF clinical research in the US, and held the Medical Directorship for the CF Therapeutics Development Network Coordinating Center in Seattle, Washington. His research has focused on host-pathogen interactions in CF lung disease, the broad impacts of CFTR correction, and evolving clinical care needs for people with CF. Since 2022, he has worked as a consultant to the CF Foundation focusing on academic clinical research support, career development, and antimicrobial drug development programs.

Dr. Felix Ratjen

Dr. Felix Ratjen is a Paediatric Respirologist in the Division of Respiratory Medicine at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and Professor of Paediatrics at the University of Toronto. He is also Program Head and Senior Scientist in the Translational Medicine research program at SickKids Research Institute. He is co-leading the CF Centre at SickKids with Christine Bear, another Senior Scientist in the Molecular Medicine Program.

Dr. Ratjen completed a majority of his medical education in Germany, along with a research fellowship at the Children's Hospital in Boston. He is involved in the organizing committees of the major respiratory meetings (American Thoracic Society, European Respiratory Society and the North American CF conference), works on multiple grant review panels is a member of the several editorial boards including the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Thorax, Pediatric Pulmonology Lancet Respiratory Medicine and the Journal of Cystic Fibrosis.

Dr. Ratjen is conducting multiple clinical trials addressing cystic fibrosis lung disease including new therapeutic strategies to target the underlying defect, treatment of airway infections such as first infection with Pseudomonas aeruginosa, airway inflammation and other important aspects of the disease. While some of these studies are single centre studies within the CF centre at SickKids or in collaboration with the adult centre at St. Michael’s Hospital, many of them include both national and international collaborations with centres in Canada, the U.S., Europe and Australia.

In addition, he is involved in developing and validating new outcome measures to quantify important aspects of CF lung disease that can be utilized in clinical trials. He also studies other lung diseases and over the recent years has developed an interest in the clinical evaluation of Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT), for which he is leading one of the largest dedicated paediatric clinics. 

Dr. Fredrick Van Goor

Fredrick Van Goor, Ph.D., is the Vice President of Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Research for Vertex Pharmaceuticals.  In this role, he works with the CF Disease Area Team to drive the company’s research, clinical, regulatory and commercial strategy and execution.  Dr. Van Goor led the biology effort for the team that discovered and developed Kalydeco, Orkambi, Symdeko, and Trikafta – Vertex’s four approved small molecule medicines that treat the underlying cause of disease in up to 90% of people with CF.  Currently, he is leading Vertex’s collaboration with Moderna to discover novel CFTR mRNA therapies for the treatment of CF. To date, the collaboration has led to the discovery of VX-522, which is in early-stage clinical studies in people with CF.  For his contributions to CF drug discovery, Dr. Van Goor has been awarded the Wiley Prize (2023), Boomer Esiason Foundation Jerry Cahill Legacy Award (2019), Respiratory Innovation Award (2018), and Doris F. Tulcin Research Award for outstanding accomplishments in CF research (2013).

Dr. Van Goor has over 20 US patents in the areas of CF and technology development and has published six book chapters in the areas of CF, ion channel drug discovery and endocrinology and authored more than 50 research articles in peer-reviewed journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology. Prior to joining Vertex in 2001, Dr. Van Goor was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Van Goor received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the University of Alberta, Canada.

Dr. Gina Hong

Gina Hong, M.D., M.H.S. is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, PA. She is the Associate Program director of the Penn Adult Cystic Fibrosis program and cares for adults with cystic fibrosis (CF). Her research is focused on translational studies evaluating the detection and impact of fungi in CF.

Dr. Hong has received a funding from the NIH/NHLBI and Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for her work utilizing selective fungal culture media and metagenomic diagnostics for the detection of fungi in cystic fibrosis (CF) sputa and investigating the association between fungal diagnoses and clinical outcomes in CF patients. Her recent work has focused on novel respiratory sampling methods, including remote sputum collection, for the detection of CF pathogens.

Dr. Heather Bean

Heather Bean is a bioanalytical chemist who specializes in untargeted metabolomics and biomarker discovery. She received a PhD in Chemistry from Georgia Tech in 2008, then conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Vermont and Dartmouth College as a Postdoctoral Fellow for the CF Foundation. Currently Heather is an Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University where she and her research team study the metabolomes of polymicrobial communities in chronic lung infections and in other natural and engineered environments. In the context of CF lung infections, the Bean Lab focuses on identifying breath volatile metabolites that correspond to the dominant infection species, clinically-relevant infection phenotypes, microbe-microbe interactions, and host-microbiome interactions in the lung.

Hilary Becker

My name is Hilary Becker and I was born on May 6th, 1992. I was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis the following October at Sick Kids Hospital, when I was six months old. My parents were told that if I made it through my first year of life, I was expected to live to twenty-seven. Here we are thirty years later, and I am healthy. Throughout my life, I have been overseen by a team of doctors who have worked to treat recurring infections that were causing a slow and steady decline in my lung function, including chronic Pseudomonas. 

I spent June 2020 to December 2021 in a revolving door with St Michaels Hospital. I was admitted to hospital seven times in eighteen months as the doctors tried to stop my decline in lung function. This decline was only halted in its tracks once I received the new gene modulator, Trikafta. Trikafta has changed the world of Cystic Fibrosis - for the patients, doctors, researchers, pathologists and everyone in between. I gained access to Trikafta January 2022, three years after the first patient in The US received it. This life-changing drug has given me a new lease on life, one free of respiratory infections. Since then, I have built my own business and a really nice life for myself, all while continuing to fight for the day when CF stands for cure found.

Dr. Hartmut Grasemann

Dr. Hartmut Grasemann graduated from University of Essen medical school in Germany in 1992. Following his initial training in paediatrics and a post doctoral training in biochemistry he came to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Harvard Medical School for a research fellowship in respiratory medicine. He returned to Germany in 2000 to complete his paediatric training at the Children’s Hospital in Essen, where he was appointed Assistant Professor in 2002 before joining the Division of Respiratory Medicine at SickKids in 2005.

Dr. Jane Davies

 Jane Davies is Professor of Paediatric Respirology & Experimental Medicine at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, in England and is a National Institute of Health Research Senior Investigator. She serves as Honorary Consultant in Paediatric Respiratory Medicine, Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust, one of the largest CF clinics in Europe. Her main areas of research interest are cystic fibrosis chronic lung infection and clinical trial design. She has been global lead investigator on a large number of international trials of CFTR modulator drugs, including in children and infants and a member of the Strategy Group of the UK CF Gene Therapy Consortium. To support paediatric studies, she established the Lung Clearance Core Facility on behalf of the European CF Society, standardizing this more sensitive pulmonary outcome measure. She is currently Vice-President of the ECFS.

Dr. Jane Hill

Dr. Hill is the Canada Research Chair of Breath Science and Technologies at the University of British Columbia. Her team specializes in the discovery and clinical validation of breath biomarkers for respiratory diseases, especially those with an infectious etiology and with a particular emphasis on people with cystic fibrosis.

Dr. Jordana Hoppe

Dr. Jordana Hoppe is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado and Children’s Hospital Colorado. Her research interests focus on the treatment of pulmonary exacerbations, remote monitoring of respiratory symptoms and CFTR modulator treatments. Over the past year she has served as a co-chair for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Remote Monitoring Endpoint Task Force, to review the current status of remote endpoints for clinical research trials with other investigators in the CF community. Dr. Hoppe is currently serving as a lead PI for the pediatric studies of VX-121. She has previously been a site PI for multiple industry and TDN/CFF sponsored multi-center CF research studies.

Dr. Jessica Clark

Dr. Jessica Clark graduated from the Northern Ontario School of Medicine in Sudbury, Ontario and completed a residency in Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Alberta in Edmonton followed by a fellowship in Endoscopic Sinus and Skull Base surgery also at the University of Alberta. She is currently a clinical lecturer within the Department of Surgery at the University of Calgary and participates in teaching of medical students and surgical residents while also active in clinical research with a goal to optimize medical and surgical therapy for patients with chronic rhinosinusitis.

Dr. Julian Forton

Dr Julian Forton is Consultant and Clinical Lead for Paediatric Respiratory Medicine at The Children’s Hospital for Wales in Cardiff and National Clinical Lead for Paediatric Respiratory Medicine in Wales. He is co-author of the Oxford Specialist Handbook of Paediatric Respiratory Medicine.

Julian runs the CF-SpIT Research Group, a group of research-active clinicians, allied professionals and scientists who are interested in how best to describe airway infection in children with cystic fibrosis. He is chief investigator and senior author of the CF Sputum Induction Trial (CF-SpIT) which showed that sputum induction in young children with CF is superior to oropharyngeal sampling and comparable to Gold-standard 2-lobe bronchoalveolar lavage for pathogen detection (Ronchetti et al. 2018. Lancet Respiratory Medicine). His team have used matched samples from multiple respiratory niches to analyse the spatial microbiology of early compartmentalised infection in young children, to interrogate how pathogen-dominance is established with time, and work to identify a clinical role for respiratory microbiota analysis in cystic fibrosis.

Dr. Marcel Behr

Dr. Marcel Behr is a clinician-scientist with appointments of Full Professor in the Department of Medicine and Associate member in the Departments of Epidemiology & Biostatistics as well as Microbiology & Immunology. He was the founding Director of the McGill International TB Centre and led it from 2012 to 2018.  He is Director of the McGill Infectious Diseases Division and the McGill Interdisciplinary Initiative in Infection and Immunity (McGill-i4).

Dr. Behr trained at the University of Toronto, Queen’s, McGill and Stanford. Dr. Behr’s lab uses bacterial genomic methodologies to study the epidemiology and pathogenesis of tuberculosis and other mycobacterial diseases. This work has helped clarify the natural history of TB, determine the basis of attenuation of the BCG vaccine, identify differences between closely related mycobacterial species and strains, and understand the innate immune response to the mycobacterial cell wall. Dr. Behr’s work has been recognized by election into the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the American Academy of Microbiology. 

Dr. Marianne Stanford

Dr. Marianne Stanford is the the Assistant Scientific Director of Institute of Infection and Immunity at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. She has expertise in both preclinical research and clinical immunology assessment of cancer immunotherapies and infectious disease vaccines through her previous work with IMV, Inc where she was the Vice President of Research and Development. She is an adjunct professor in Microbiology and Immunology at Dalhousie University, a member of the Vaccine Discovery group of the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology, and an Associate Member of the Beatrice Hunter Cancer Research Institute. Marianne conducted her postdoctoral training at the Robarts Research Institute and at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, focusing on the use of viruses in the development of novel cancer treatments. She received her BSc and MSc from Memorial University of Newfoundland and her PhD from Dalhousie University.

Dr. Michael D. Parkins

Michael D. Parkins completed an MSc in Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Microbiology and a Medical Doctorate at the University of Calgary in 2000 and 2003, respectively.  He is a Professor in the Departments of Medicine, and Microbiology & Infectious Disease in the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary.  MDP is the Section Chief of Infectious Diseases, and the Clinic Director of the Southern Alberta Adult Cystic Fibrosis Clinic and Calgary’s Home Parenteral Therapy Programs.  His research interests focus on CF airways infection and treatment response, and the epidemiology of antibiotic resistant organisms.

Dr. Pradeep Singh

Singh is Professor of Microbiology and Medicine and Director of the Cystic Fibrosis Research Development Program at the University of Washington. Singh’s work focuses on chronic bacterial infections and developing new anti-infective approaches.

Dr. Ranelle Myers

​Dr. Myers is an interventional respirologist at Vancouver General Hosptial and BC Cancer. She is the medical director of the bronchoscopy program at VGH and the medical lead for the BC Cancer Smoking Cessation Program. She recently developed and leads the breathomics lab at the BC cancer research center, the first in Canada, focused on analysis of volatile organic compounds in breath with a focus on the early detection of lung cancer and the study of the microbiome of the lung. She completed medical school, internal medicine and a respirology fellowship at the University of Manitoba then completed a fellowship in Interventional pulmonary at Harvard University. She recently trained at the University of Leicester in the UK to learn about the study of volatile organic compounds in breath. Her labs focus is to develop a simple, non-invasive breath test to improve diagnoses of lung cancer through compounds in exhaled breath. The lab works at the intersection of clinical practice, patient-centered care and analytical methodology to provide an interdisciplinary approach to advance the prognosis of lung cancer. 

Dr. Ranjani Somayaji

Dr. Ranjani Somayaji is an infectious disease specialist and is an Assistant Professor and clinician scientist at the University of Calgary. Dr. Somayaji’s research interests include understanding the role and impact of airway infections in persons living with cystic fibrosis.

Dr. Robert A. Quinn

 Robert Quinn’s career has crossed several microbiome fields, from fish and corals to lungs and guts. He received his undergraduate degree in microbiology from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and his PhD from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he studied bacterial shell disease of the American lobster. He then began a postdoc with Forest Rohwer at San Diego State University with a fellowship from a non-profit cystic fibrosis institute to study dynamics of the CF lung microbiome. He transitioned to the University of California San Diego under the mentorship of Pieter Dorrestein to learn advanced metabolomics methods. In his current faculty position at Michigan State University, Quinn and his team use microbial ecology theory and metabolomics to understand the dynamics of microbiomes in the cystic fibrosis lung, human gut, and coral reefs.

Dr. Valerie Waters

Dr Valerie Waters is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Toronto. She has been a full time staff physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases since 2005. She is the infectious diseases consultant for the cystic fibrosis (CF) clinic at the Hospital for Sick Children and St Michael’s Hospital, Toronto. She is also a Senior Associate Scientist with the Research Institute at the Hospital for Sick Children. Her primary research focus is the diagnosis and management of multi-drug resistant pathogens in CF including the effect of biofilms and polymicrobial interactions on antimicrobial susceptibility. She also studies the clinical impact of pulmonary exacerbations in CF and the role of the pulmonary microbiome in CF. 

Dr. Zhenyu Cheng

Dr. Zhenyu Cheng is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University.

His lab has been focusing on the study of host-bacterial interactions. Dr. Cheng finished his undergraduate study in 2002 at Wuhan University in China. He then went to University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada to pursue his graduate studies. After obtaining his PhD degree in 2010, Dr. Cheng went to Boston for his postdoctoral position that is jointly appointed in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. During his postdoctoral training, Dr. Cheng received a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Government of Canada, followed by a Tosteson Medical Discovery Award from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Cheng started his independent research lab at Dalhousie University since 2016. He is a recipient of Dalhousie President’s Research Excellence Awards for Emerging Investigators and Canadian Institutes of Health Research Bhagirath Singh Early Career Prize in Infection and Immunity. His CF-related research mainly focuses on the opportunistic bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, particularly host inflammatory and stress signaling pathways modulated by bacteria-secreted proteases. In addition, the Cheng lab also characterize the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) mechanisms and strive to tackle the AMR issues.