Keynote Speakers

Mary-Beth Fisk, President & COO In 2011, Mary Beth Fisk was appointed President & Chief Operating Officer of the South Texas Blood & Tissue Center. She oversees all operations of the Center to include a full service tissue bank, blood services, GenCure operations to include tissue, marrow and Peripheral blood stem cell collection/processing program, the Texas Cord Blood Bank, as well as oversight of support services such as IS/IT, QA, and Communications departments. Mary Beth has 15 years of experience in the tissue banking field and over 25 years experience in blood banking and administration. She is a Certified Medical Technologist (MT) with a focus on specialization in blood banking, a Certified Quality Auditor for the American Society for Quality (ASQ), and a Certified Tissue Banking Specialist (CTBS). She serves in many leadership positions with the national blood, cellular therapy, and tissue banking professional standard-setting organizations. She currently serves in numerous capacities with the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP), the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB), America’s Blood Centers (ABC), as well as the American Association of Tissue Banks (AATB). She is presently serving a second term as treasurer on the Board of Governors of the AATB. Mary Beth was elected to serve on the AABB Cellular Therapy Coordinating Board and has done so for the past two years. In the past, Mary Beth has served as Chair of the Program and Accreditation Committee of the AATB and served as Vice-Chair of the Tissue Bank Council for the AATB, and as Secretary of the Chapter 1404 ASQ. Mary Beth has been responsible, over the past 10 years, for the continuing development and operations of the cadaveric tissue bank and the Texas Cord Blood Bank (a public cord blood bank program) – program design, contractual agreements, training, development of the processing technology, and oversight of the collection, processing and storage, and distribution of cord blood. Mary Beth serves as the Executive Director of The Blood & Tissue Center Foundation. The mission of the Foundation is to support select programs of the Center. Mary Beth has a passion for the cord blood and adult bone marrow PBSC programs, primarily due to being a stem cell transplant family. Her nephew, Bradley, (who was raised just as a son), received a stem cell transplant in March 2008. The only possible stem cell donor for Bradley was a high degree of his match, due to Native American ancestry. Six months post-transplant, Bradley lost his battle with cancer due to graft versus host disease. The experience has greatly enhanced Mary Beth’s passion to increase opportunities for patients to have quality cord blood available for transplantation.
Ulf Landegren, Principal Investigator Ulf Landegren received his MD and PhD in Uppsala, Sweden, before working with Lee Hood at Caltech for five years. Back in Uppsala he now is professor of molecular medicine where his research is focused on developing and applying advanced molecular tools for analyzing macromolecules and their functions in body fluids and in situ. Examples of techniques from his lab include the oligonucleotide ligation assay (OLA) and padlock probes for measuring and distinguishing specific DNA and RNA sequences, and proximity ligation for highly sensitive detection of proteins or for measurement of interacting molecules. Professor Landegren is a member of EMBO, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Scientific Advisory Committee for European Academies, and HUGO, vice-chair of Science for Life Laboratory Uppsala, Assistant department head, Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Member of SAB at Centers for Translational Mol Med, and Cardiovascular Research, both in the Netherlands, Member of SAB Max Planck Inst f Mol Genetics Berlin, Member/chair of SAB German Cancer Research Center Div of Structural and Functional Genomics, Heidelberg, Visiting senior scientist at RIKEN Institute, Yokohama, Japan, Fellow of School of Engineering, University of Tokyo, Japan, Co-chair of a workpackage for technologies and reagents for biobank analysis in a European infrastructure for biobanking – BBMRI, Member of SAB of Alacris Theranostics, Berlin, Germany, Chair of SAB, HaloGenomics, Uppsala. He has authored 165 peer-reviewed publications, and is inventor of 32 patents or applications, and his lab has spun out five biotech companies.
Pamela Pinzani, Technical Coordinator Pamela Pinzani graduated in 1985 from Florence University in Italy discussing a thesis at the Faculty of Biology. After post-degree periods as visiting scientist at the University of Medicine in Lubeck (Germany) and at the Dept. of Hormone Research of the Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot, Israel), she worked on the application and development of immunological methods with non-isotopic tracer and on the optimization of bioluminescence and chemiluminescence assays to investigate urinary metabolites of steroid hormones and proteins and for the use of the enzyme luciferase as reporter gene. More recently she demonstrated a special interest in molecular technologies for the optimization of real-time quantitative PCR protocols to assess the clinical significance of altered gene-expression profiles in the context of human solid tumors. Moreover she focused her studies on the blood compartment as a source of biomolecular markers to be used like diagnostic and prognostic parameters. In this context she developed methods for the measurement of tumor-related markers in cell-free plasma DNA and for the detection of circulating tumor cells (CTC) in the peripheral blood of oncological patients. She was involved in the organization of 6 courses or International meeting on Bioluminescence & Chemiluminescence Applications from 1993 to 1998 and of 10 courses or meetings on real-time PCR from 2000 to 2010.She participated as a speaker to about 30 International Scientific Meetings. She is author of about 75 publications in International peer reviewed journals, 30 papers included in national and international books and 20 manuscripts published in national journals.
Kurt Zatloukal, Professor Kurt Zatloukal’s research work focuses on molecular pathology of metabolic liver diseases and cancer. He coordinated the preparatory phase of a European biobanking and biomolecular research infrastructure (BBMRI) within the 7th EU framework programme. BBMRI should provide access to high quality human biological samples to enable future needs of large genetic epidemiology and sequencing studies. In this context it is crucial to establish Europe-wide harmonized processes and quality criteria that are compliant with the requirements of latest -omics technologies as well as with ethical and legal regulations. Furthermore, he leads in the FP7-funded large integrated project SPIDIA the development of new European standards and norms for tissue-based biomarkers, and leads the medical platform of the FET Flagship project IT Future of Medicine. Kurt Zatloukal was member of the OECD task force on biological resource centres and the Roadmap Working Group of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures. Moreover, he contributed to the OECD best practice guidelines for biological resource centres, the regulations for genetic testing of the Austrian Gene Technology Law, and the opinion on Biobanks for research of the Bioethics Commission at the Austrian Federal Chancellery.