Lecturer MD Ph.D Istvan Petak
Semmelweis University, Budapest, HU& University of Illinois, Illinois, USA
Dr. Petak has over 25 years of scientific carrier in the field of precision medicine, molecular pharmacology, drug discovery, and predictive molecular pharmaco-diagnostics of anti-cancer targeted therapies. He is a senior lecturer at the Department of Pharmacology, Semmelweis University, and an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He is also the co-founder of the Oncompass Medicine Corp. He obtained MD and Ph.D. from Semmelweis University, Hungary in 1995 and 2000. In the first years of his carrier, he has published several biochemical research articles about the molecular regulation of apoptosis induced by anti-cancer therapies. He spent five years at the Department of Molecular Pharmacology of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, the USA as a Fulbright Scholar. During this period he conducted research on death receptors as novel biological targets and published articles in Cancer Research, Clinical Cancer Research, Cell Death, and Differentiation. He was among the first, who used molecular evidence to treat lung cancer patients prospectively in 2003, which was first published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in 2005. Dr. Petak has published 150 articles in the field of signal transduction therapies, molecular diagnostics, and precision oncology. He was an invited author of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery in 2010. Among other societies, he is a member of the Swiss Group of Clinical Cancer Research, ESMO, and ASCO. Dr. Petak also serves as the chairman of the Scientific and Ethical Committee of the Hungarian Biotechnology Association. Dr. Petak received Gabor Denes Award in 2012. Dr. Petak presented his medical software to find effective cancer therapy for each molecular alteration, developed by his team, at the 10th Precision Medicine World Conference in 2016. He was an invited faculty speaker at the annual meeting of the European Society of Medical Oncology in Madrid, 2017. The work he had led has received the best abstract award of the "Breakthrough Innovations in Oncology" conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncologists (ASCO), Bangkok, 2019. In 2021, under his leadership, Oncompass Medicine was selected to be the winner of the Future Unicorn Award of DIGITALEUROPE and won the Global Get In the Ring start-up competition in the health category.
