Dr. Hongwei Cheng is the co-founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Scientific Officer of PharmaPlanter Technologies.

As a trained medical practitioner in China, Dr. Cheng has over 10 years of clinical experience in plastic and orthopaedic surgery. He obtained his PhD in surgery from Peking Union Medical College and received his postdoctoral fellowship training at the University of Chicago in Molab with Dr. Tong-Chuan He.

As a scientist, Dr. Cheng has 7 years of experience in animal modelling and translational research from the University of British Columbia. He has authored over 50 scientific papers in plastic surgery, cancer biology, disease modelling and drug discovery, with many of them published in prestigious journals including Nature, Cancer Cell, and Blood. He is the first scientist to discover that BMP9 is the most potent osteogenetic growth factor among all the 14 BMP protein family members.

Dr. Cheng is also a distinguished professor and the director of the PDX modelling and translational medicine laboratory at Xinxiang Medical School.

Dr. Nahum Sonenberg has been a professor at McGill University in the Department of Biochemistry and the Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Research Centre since 2002.

Dr. Sonenberg’s primary research interests are in the field of translational control in health and disease. He studies the molecular basis of the control of protein synthesis in eukaryotic cells and its importance in diseases such as cancer, obesity, diabetes, and neurological diseases.

Notably, in 1978, he identified the mRNA 5’ cap-binding protein, eIF4E, the rate-limiting component of the eukaryotic translation apparatus. He later discovered the Internal Ribosome Entry Site (IRES) mechanism of translation initiation in eukaryotes, and the regulation of cap-dependent translation by eIF4E-binding proteins (4E-BPs). He also discovered that eIF4E is a proto- oncogene, whose levels are elevated in tumours. Subsequently, he showed that rapamycin (an anti-cancer drug that suppresses mTOR) inhibits eIF4E activity. While generating eIF4E binding protein knock-out mice, he discovered that the protein plays important roles in metabolism, learning and memory, and innate immunity. More recently he showed that eIF4E is implicated in autism and Fragile-X Syndrome as well as in the function of the circadian clock.

Dr. Sonenberg has been elected to several prestigious societies. He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1992, he is a senior international research scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2010. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and The Royal Society of London in 2006. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 2012, he was elected as an Associate Member of the EMBO in 2013, and in 2015, he was elected Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences and International Member of the National Academy of Medicine (USA).

Dr. Sonenberg has received numerous awards in recognition of his leadership in biomedical research including the 2002 Robert L. Noble Prize from the National Cancer Institute of Canada, the 2005 Killam Prize for Health Sciences, and the 2008 Gairdner International Award. He received the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 2008 for his contributions to medical science, he was awarded the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Health Researcher of the Year Award in Biomedical and Clinical Research in 2009, and he received the 2012 Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Science. Dr. Sonenberg received the 2013 McLaughlin Medal from the Royal Society of Canada, the 2014 Wolf Prize in Medicine, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Laval in 2016. In 2018 he was awarded the Prix Du Quebec Wilder-Penfield Prize from the Government of Quebec, Canada.

Currently, Dr. Sonenberg has expanded his research into topics such as the roles of translation in neurobiology and synaptic plasticity. Presently, his lab works on translational control in cancer, oncolytic viruses as anti-cancer drugs, microRNA control of translation, learning and memory, and translational control of plasticity.

Dr. Poul Sorenson is board-certified anatomic pathologist who specializes in the molecular pathology of pediatric cancers. He obtained his undergraduate, medical, and PhD degrees from the University of British Columbia (UBC) and McGill University. Dr. Sorensen holds the Johal Endowed Chair in Childhood Cancer Research and he is Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UBC.

His career has been dedicated to understanding the biological underpinnings of childhood cancers. His research focuses on targeting aberrant signaling pathways that are activated in childhood cancers and breast carcinoma. Dr. Sorensen’s laboratory uses a combination of genetic and biochemical approaches to identify proteins that are specifically altered in human tumours. His laboratory has discovered many novel genetic alterations in human cancers.

Most notably, he discovered a novel type of genomic alteration called an NTRK gene fusion, which causes diverse types of childhood cancer, breast tumours, and other human malignancies. His discovery of NTRK fusions led to the development of new treatments for patients whose cancer is caused by this genomic alteration. One such treatment, larotrectinib, is the first drug to be simultaneously studied and approved for both pediatric and adult cancers by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2018. In 2019, larotrectinib was approved by Health Canada with the brand name VITRAKVI® as a tumour agnostic treatment that can be used to treat more than 24 forms of cancer with this genomic alteration, including rare pediatric cancers.

Dr. Sorensen has received numerous prestigious awards including the 2016 Canadian Cancer Society’s Robert L. Noble Prize, the 2019 Blood Burton Award, the 2020 Aubrey J Tingle Prize, and the 2021 Order of British Columbia. In 2016, he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Dr. Sorensen is a founding member of the American Association for Cancer Research’s Pediatric Cancer Working Group. He is the former chair of the Translational Research Committee of the Children’s Oncology Group, the largest pediatric oncology clinical trials network in the world.

Dr. Lee is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UBC’s Faculty of Medicine, and works as a researcher and medical microbiologist with Island Health. Trained in Internal Medicine, Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology at the University of Toronto, her clinical and research interests include refractory and recurrent Clostridium difficile infection, antimicrobial resistant organisms, inflammatory bowel disease, and fostering appropriate lab use and best practices.

Dr. Lee’s research interests include fecal microbiota transplant, refractory and recurrent Clostridium difficile infection, antimicrobial resistant organisms, inflammatory bowel disease, and fostering appropriate lab use and best practices. Dr. Lee is a recipient of the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Health Professional Investigator Award. With this award, she has established the British Columbia Associated Lyophilized (LYO) Microbiota Program (BCaLM), which aims to establish the safety of lyophilized Fecal Microbiota Transplant for patients living with chronic gut disorders.

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Dr. Jun Zhang, MD, PhD, is a board-certified medical oncologist and physician-scientist. Dr. Zhang brings deep clinical and research expertise, with over 100 publications in top journals such as NEJM, Cancer Cell, and JAMA Oncology. He played a key role in clinical trials, including the FDA approval of adagrasib (Krazati) for lung cancer. Dr. Zhang trained at Harvard, UCSF, and Emory, and currently also serves as Associate Professor, co-Director of the Lung Cancer Program, and Associate Director of the Early Phase Program at the University of Kansas Cancer Center.