Speaker Profile

Carolyn Compton

Biography

Carolyn Compton, M.D., Ph.D., is an academic pathologist specializing in gastrointestinal disease and is board certified in both anatomic and clinical pathology. She is a Professor of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and a Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine. She is an adjunct Professor of Pathology at the Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Arizona School of Medicine.She is the Chief Medical Officer of the National Biomarkers Development Alliance, a member of the BioDesign Institute. She is a former Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Gastrointestinal Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Pathologist-in-Chief of the Boston Shriners Children’s Hospital. More recently she has served as the CEO and President of the Critical Path Institute (2012), the Director of the Office of Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research and the Director of the Innovative Molecular Analysis Technologies program at the National Cancer Institute (2005-2011), and the Strathcona Professor and Chair of the Department of Pathology at McGill University and Pathologist-in-Chief of the McGill University Health Center (2000-2005). She is a past Chair of the Cancer Committee of the College of American Pathologists and the immediate past Chair of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC). Currently, she is the Chair of the Precision Medicine Core of the AJCC and the Chair of the Specimen Standards for Precision Medicine Project of the College of American Pathologists. She serves on the United States Technical Advisory Group to the International Standards Organization and the Scientific and Ethical Advisory Board of the BBMRI of the European Research Infrastructure Consortium. She is a member of the Boar of Directors of HealthTell, Inc, and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of Indivumed GmbH. Her research interests focus on colorectal cancer, medical prediction, biospecimen and biobanking science, and biomarker development. She has authored more than 500 scientific manuscripts, review articles, books, chapters and abstracts.

Talk

Developing Clinically Important (and Useful) Oncology Biomarkers: Challenges and Solutions
Biomarkers represent an intense area of scientific inquiry and the very foundation of precision (molecularly based) medicine which makes them an unparalleled value proposition in oncology. However, their development and use in the clinic faces a number of daunting challenges ranging from problems in discovery to validation in clinical trials. Although literally hundreds of thousands of biomarkers have been reported, very few have found use in the clinic. The mission of the NBDA, a biomarker think tank, is to bring solutions to the key challenges that face the biomarker field. The presentation will explore these key challenges and NBDA’s solution strategies.