Irene Ganan-Gomez, PhD, is an Instructor in the Department of Leukemia at MD Anderson Cancer Center. In her postdoctoral studies in the same institution, she specialized in MDS hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) biology and discovered that the HSCs that maintain the disease and drive progression to secondary AML upon relapse to hypomethylating agents (HMAs) are in one of two distinct hierarchies that gain specific oncogenic dependencies at the time of disease progression. This finding allowed her to stratify patients in two biologically different MDS subtypes that predict for drug sensitivities after failure to HMAs. Dr. Ganan-Gomez’s current research is focused on understanding how MDS HSCs overpopulate the BM of the patients and induce inefficient hematopoiesis at the onset of the disease and in premalignant stages such as clonal cytopenias of undetermined significance (CCUS), with the aim of identifying novel therapeutic targets that allow early therapeutic intervention to prevent or halt the development of MDS.

Ulrich Germing is Professor of Internal Medicine and Vice head of the Dept. of Hematology, Oncology, and Clinical Immunology at the University Clinic of the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. He is interested in Diagnosis, Classification, Prognosis and Treatment of myeloid Malignancies, head of the Düsseldorf MDS Registry and Speaker of the German-Austrian-Suisse MDS Group.