Swiss-Canadian Innovation Symposium

Professor, Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry and the Institute for Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto

Dr. Alison McGuigan is a Professor in Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry and the Institute for Biomedical Engineering at University of Toronto. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Tissue Engineering and Disease Modelling. She obtained her undergraduate degree from University of Oxford, her PhD from University of Toronto, and completed Post Doctoral Fellowships at Harvard University and Stanford School of Medicine.

Dr. McGuigan has made pioneering contributions to the engineering of tissue models to explore mechanisms of disease and regeneration. Her team exploits materials and engineering technologies to create artificial tissues in a dish which can be used to develop and discover new drugs, decide which drugs to give to which people, and potentially to predict which people are likely to get sick from specific diseases.

Dr. McGuigan has received numerous honors including being elected to the Royal Society of Canada-College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. a Fellow of the Canadian National Academy of Engineering and most recently she received an NSERC Arthur B McDonald Fellowship. 

Sr. Scientist, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, UHN
Chief Scientific Officer, Structural Genomics Consortium, Toronto

Cheryl Arrowsmith is a Senior Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, and the Chief Scientist of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the structural and chemical biology of chromatin and epigenetic regulatory factors especially as relates to cancer and drug discovery. In partnership with major pharmaceutical companies, she leads the SGC’s international open science program that is developing and distributing unencumbered Chemical Probes that support the discovery of new medicines. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and carried out postdoctoral research at Stanford University, and was co-founder of Affinium Pharmaceuticals, which developed a new medicine for multidrug resistant bacteria. She has published over 300 research articles, and was recognized by Clarivate Analytics as being among the worlds top 1% of highly cited scientists in 2018, 2019 and 2022, 2023. She was elected a AAAS Fellow (2015), and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2020).

Professor, Head of the Institute of Translational Medicine, ETH Zürich 

Bernd Wollscheid, Ph.D., is founder of DISCO Pharmaceuticals. He is a Professor of Molecular Health and Head of the Institute of Translational Medicine at the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH Zürich, Switzerland. As the chairman of EC of the ETH domain Strategic Focus Area, “Personalized Health and Related Technology (PHRT),” he aims to bridge the gap between scientific discoveries and their practical applications in healthcare.

Bernd’s research team pioneers developing and applying next-generation technologies at the intersection of biology, chemistry, medicine, and bioinformatics. This research contributes to understanding how molecular nanoscale organization influences cellular function and opens up new opportunities for theranostics.

Bernd studied Chemistry and holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Immunology from the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology in Freiburg, Germany. He performed post-doctoral research at the Institute of Systems Biology, Seattle, USA.

Associate Research Director, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, UHN
Professor of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto

Dr. Gang Zheng is a Senior Scientist and Associate Research Director of the Princess Margaret Cancer Center. He is also a Professor of Medical Biophysics and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Cancer Nanomedicine at the University of Toronto. Dr. Zheng obtained his BSc in Chemistry from Hangzhou University (now Zhejiang University) in 1988 and PhD in Medicinal Chemistry from SUNY Buffalo in 1999. Following a postdoctoral training in photodynamic therapy at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, he joined the University of Pennsylvania in 2001 as an Assistant Professor of Radiology, where he invented activatable photosensitizers for photodynamic therapy. Since moving to Canada in 2006, his lab is best known for the discovery of porphysome nanotechnology for cancer theranostics. He is a Fellow of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and Royal Society of Chemistry and served as an Associate Editor for Bioconjugate Chemistry from 2014 to 2024.

Investigator, Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai HospitalAssistant Professor, Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto

Dr. Hartland Jackson is an Investigator at Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health, and an Associate Scientist, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.

Dr. Jackson’s research involves the use of mass cytometry for highly multiplexed imaging of tumour tissues and the development of methods for the analysis of spatially resolved single cell data.

He obtained his PhD from the University of Toronto and undertook postdoctoral training at the University of Zürich. His work with high-dimension pathology imaging of breast cancer patient samples has revealed the organization of the tumour microenvironment and identified single-cell defined patient subgroups with distinct clinical outcome.

The Jackson lab strives to understand tissues and tumours as the integrated outcome of their single cell components. To do so, they utilize multiplexed imaging to simultaneously quantify single cell phenotypes and markers of their functional state, as well as their interactions, overall organization, and contribution to tissue architecture. These methods facilitate spatially-resolved screening of distinct clones in mouse models of disease and the identification of biomarkers associated with clinical outcome in biobanked patient tissues.

Research efforts are focused on identifying and targeting the multi-cellular tumour microenvironments that drive disease progression and therapeutic resistance in cancers of the breast and other epithelial tissues.

Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Donnelly Centre, Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto
Co-founder, Dualsystems Biotech (Zurich, Switzerland) and Perturba Therapeutics (Toronto, Canada)

Dr. Igor Stagljar is a Professor in the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the Donnelly Centre, University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Zurich and the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, before joining the University of Toronto in 2005.

Together with his team, Dr. Stagljar has developed innovative technologies to study protein–protein interactions, particularly of human membrane proteins linked to cancer and other diseases. His lab pioneered several widely used platforms, including the Membrane Yeast Two-Hybrid (MYTH) and Mammalian Membrane Two-Hybrid (MaMTH) systems, as well as SIMPL and SIMPL2, which enable the discovery of novel drug candidates. These tools have helped open new avenues to target proteins once considered “undruggable,” advancing both basic research and translational applications.

With his trainees and collaborators, Dr. Stagljar has co-authored more than 140 publications and is an inventor on nine patents. In June 2025, he became the founding Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier’s new journal Disease and Therapeutics, a role he views as an opportunity to support the scientific community and highlight the achievements of researchers worldwide.

Principal Investigator, Structural Genomics Consortium
Professor, Pharmacology & Toxicology, University of Toronto
Affiliate Scientist, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, UHN

Matthieu Schapira is heading research informatics at the Structural Genomics Consortium where his group combines physics-based and deep learning approaches to accelerate hit discovery and optimization. He leads the CACHE benchmarking initiative to reveal the state-of-the-art and guide progress in computational hit finding. He is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology at University of Toronto, Affiliate Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center, University Health Network, and Associate Scientific Director at PRiME. He trained as a chemist, biochemist, structural biologist and computational chemist and held positions in academia and biotechs in the US and Europe.

To accelerate the impact of machine learning on computational drug design, the Structural Genomics Consortium is generating over the next five years a training dataset composed of billions of protein-ligand binding datapoints for thousands of proteins using DNA encoded library and affinity selection mass spectrometry. All data is publicly released on AIRCHECK.ai, a dedicated platform. Computational methods from hundreds of computational chemists and AI experts around the world are prospectively benchmarked in the CACHE and DREAM challenges

Full Professor, Paternot Chair in Cancer Research, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Group Leader, Thomä Lab, Friedrich Miescher Institute of Biomedical Research

Dr. Nicolas Thomä was educated at the University of Cambridge, UK, where he received his PhD with Dr. Peter Leadlay in Chemical Biology; followed by postdoctoral work in structural biology in the laboratories of Prof. Roger Goody (Max-Planck-Institute Dortmund, Germany) and Prof. Nikola Pavletich (MSKCC, New York, USA). In 2006 Nicolas became a group leader-at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland, where he was promoted to senior group leader in 2012. As of 2023 Nicolas Thomä holds the Paternot chair for Interdisciplinary Cancer Research ISREC and the EPFL in Lausanne, and is the head of the drug development center at the EPFL school of life sciences.

Head of the Center for Radiopharmaceutical Sciences, Paul Scherrer Institute
Full Professor, Dept. Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zürich

Prof. Roger Schibli is Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences (ETH Zurich) since 2010, and Laboratory Head at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). He is leading the Center for Radiopharmaceutical Science (CRS), a joint endeavor between the ETH Zurich and the Paul Scherrer Institute. Prof. Schibli studied Chemistry at the University of Basel. His early research was dedicated to the development of new organometallic complexes of technetium and rhenium for potential radiopharmaceutical application. After his graduation, he spent two years at the University of Missouri-Columbia as a post-doctoral fellow. He was appointed Assistant Professor for Therapeutics Technologies at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (ETH Zurich) in 2004 and was tenured in 2009. Prof. Schibli's research is directed towards targeted tumor diagnosis and therapy using radiolabeled compounds from “bench-to-bedside”. Apart from the development of new radionuclides, identification of novel targeting molecules and their radioactive labeling, his group emphasizes on the biological and pharmacological characterization and optimization of the radioactive compounds including the translation of promising tracer candidates for clinical testing. He is also a co-founder of the Biotech company Araris Biotech (www.ararisbiotech.com/).

Tenure Track Assistant Professor, Institute for Machine Learning, Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich

Valentina Boeva is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Machine Learning, Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, where she leads research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computational biology. Her work focuses on developing novel algorithms to analyze high-dimensional genomic, epigenomic, and spatial omics data, with a strong emphasis on applications in cancer research. She has authored over 60 scientific publications, is a recipient of multiple national and international research grants, and regularly serves on scientific advisory boards, conference committees, and editorial boards. Through her leadership, teaching, and mentoring, she is advancing AI-driven precision medicine and training the next generation of interdisciplinary scientists.