Clinical Advisers

Dr Jose Iglesias has over 30 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry, primarily focused on the clinical development of new oncology drugs and has held senior executive leadership roles with many of the leading oncology pharmaceutical companies including GSK, Eli Lilly, AMGEN, Abraxis and Celgene. During this time, he has designed and developed clinical trials for all phases of clinical trials (Phase 1-to-Phase 4), including three oncology Phase 3 registration trials that involved over 2,000 patients. Dr Iglesias was responsible for the Phase 3 development of Abraxane in pancreatic cancer, lung cancer and metastatic breast cancer. As a result of this work, Abraxane became the new worldwide standard of care of the treatment of advanced pancreatic cancer.

Jordan Berlin, MD, is a medical oncologist who specializes in gastrointestinal cancers and investigational drug development (Phase I). In his roles as the Associate Director for Clinical Research and Director of Phase I Research at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Dr. Berlin serves to coordinate clinical and translational efforts across the cancer center from the research programs to the phase I program as well as from within the VICC research programs. He is responsible for advancing preclinical data and investigational drugs to investigator-initiated trials and clinical evaluation. Dr. Berlin has extensive experience designing investigator-initiated and cooperative group trials as well as experience advising the pharmaceutical industry on trial design and development. Dr. Berlin is the PI of the VICC National Clinical Trials Network Lead Academic Participating Site Grant and the VICC PI of the VIKTriY multi-site UM1 grant led overall by Pat LoRusso at Yale Cancer Center. Additionally, as the immediate-past Medical Director of the Clinical Trials Office (CTO), he mentors several junior investigators in phase I and GI malignancies and continues to mentor Vicki Keedy, MD. in her role as current Medical Director of the CTO.

Dr Borad received his MD from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, completed internal medicine training at Cedars-Sinai, medical oncology training at Tulane University, and was a Genomics Medicine and Drug Development Scholar at TGen under the tutelage of Dr Daniel Von Hoff. His team was the first to demonstrate anti-tumor activity in FGFR2-fusion cholangiocarcinomas using small molecule FGFR2 inhibitors and to introduce an oncolytic Rhabdovirus into human clinical studies. His work is supported by grants from the US NIH, NCI, DOD and FDA. He is currently a Professor of Medicine, Program Leader for the Gene and Virus Therapy Program, and Director of the Precision Cancer Therapeutics Program at Mayo Clinic

Dr Jason Lickliter trained as a medical oncologist in Australia and at the University of Minnesota and is currently the Chief Medical Officer at Nucleus Network, a multi-centre phase 1 clinical trials organization. He began working with Amplia on the AMP945 phase 1 trial in healthy volunteers and has since become an adviser for the ACCENT trial. Dr Lickliter has extensive experience in designing and implementing early-phase patient and healthy-volunteer clinical trials, including the integration of biomarker studies and advanced imaging into clinical research.

Nick Pavlakis is medical oncologist with more than 20 years’ experience in clinical and translational research with experience in new drug development and evaluation of drug resistance and biomarkers in lung cancer, mesothelioma, and Gastrointestinal (GI) malignancies, including pancreas cancer. He is the Board Chair of the Thoracic Oncology Group of Australia (TOGA) and member Upper GI Working Party, the Australasian Gastrointestinal Trials Group (AGITG). He is study co-chair of several national and international co-operative group studies. He has supervised PhD students undergoing projects in lung cancer, pancreas cancer and NETs. He has served on the Scientific Advisory Committee and as Grant Reviewer for the former Avner Foundation and more recently on the Pancreatic Cancer Foundation Clinician Advisory Panel.