Keynote presentation 6: Prof Meiyu Geng
Tracks
Track 6
Track 7
Track 8
| Wednesday, July 15, 2026 |
| 4:45 PM - 5:30 PM |
Details
The past decades have witnessed the tremendous progress cancer precision medicine, in particular for treating cancers bearing oncogenic drivers. Thus far, over 100 molecularly targeted anticancer drugs have been approved for clinical use, and are benefiting a large population of cancer patients. Despite all these advancements, targeted anticancer therapies remain being challenged by limited response rate and frequently occurred drug resistance. Facing these challenges, we took an integrative approach to gain in-depth insights into the heterogeneous property of human cancers. We are particularly interested to understand how the oncogenic drivers are interplaying with downstream effectors to drive malignant growth. These efforts have allowed us to identify the specifically-coupled oncogenic drivers and the downstream transcription factors in different cancer context, which can be used as molecular biomarkers informing patient stratification, response assessment and drug resistance management. These insights have largely facilitated the in-house drug innovation, which led to the discovery of over 10 innovative drug candidates currently undergoing clinical trials in China and overseas. Among them, Glumetinib, a highly-specific c-Met inhibitor, has been approved for market in both China and Japan for treating non-small-cell lung cancer harboring MET exon 14 skipping mutations and SAF-189s, an ALK inhibitor, have completed the phase III trial in treating ALK-positive non-small-cell lung cancer and filed NDA in China. Both drugs showed the potential as best-in-class, further highlighting the importance of precision medicine-guided drug innovation.
Speaker
Prof Meiyu Geng
State Key Laboratory of Drug Research, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Anticancer drug development in the era of precision medicine
Biography
Meiyu Geng received her Ph.D. degree from Tokyo University, Japan. She is currently a professor and principal investigator at Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr. Geng’s research interest is to discover new targeted anticancer therapies. She has played a leading role in the discovery and development of more than ten targeted cancer therapies, particularly small-molecule inhibitors targeting receptor tyrosine kinases and epigenetic modulators, with two having been approved for market in China or overseas. She is the co-inventor of more than 120 domestic or international patents. In parallel to drug discovery, her team is interested to implement precision medicine in drug discovery, particularly to discover molecular biomarkers that inform patient stratification, response assessment and drug resistance management. As the corresponding author, Dr. Geng has published over 170 research articles in peer-reviewed journals including Cell, Cancer Cell, etc. Dr. Geng has received a number of prestigious national awards, such as China Guanghua Engineering Science and Technology Award, Prize of Scientific and Technological Progress of Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation, Wu Jieping-Paul Janssen Medical & Pharmaceutical Award, 1st Award of Shanghai Outstanding Talents
