The IASLC recently announced the chairs for the 2025 World Conference on Lung Cancer. The chairs—Umberto Malapelle, PhD; Jarushka Naidoo, MB BCH, MHS; Isabelle Opitz, MD; and Noemí Reguart, MD, PhD—will plan the 51st annual meeting of the association in Barcelona, Spain, September 6-9, 2025. The chairs will work together to select program track members and choose meeting content. They will also serve as ambassadors for international oncologists who attend the meeting.
Umberto Malapelle, PhD
Prof. Malapelle is an Associate Professor in the School of Medicine and the Chair of the Predictive Molecular Pathology Laboratory in the Department of Public Health at the University Federico II, Naples, Italy. He also serves as Scientific Secretary of the International Society of Liquid Biopsy and is editor-in-chief of The Journal of Liquid Biopsy. Prof. Malapelle’s main research interest is in the field of genomic biomarker validation and testing for predictive information in solid tumors with a special focus on lung cancer.
Prof. Malapelle has been an active member of the IASLC, serving on the Liquid Biopsy Track for WCLC 2021, the Program Committee for Tumor Biology & Biomarkers for WCLC 2022, and speaking at WCLC 2023. He also co-authored the IASLC’s consensus statement on liquid biopsy for advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), which was published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology in 2021.
Jarushka Naidoo, MB BCH, MHS
Dr. Naidoo is a Full Professor of Medical Oncology and Consultant Medical Oncologist at Beaumont RCSI Cancer Centre in Dublin, Ireland. She is also an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Naidoo is a clinical trialist and clinical/translational researcher with a research interest in NSCLC, immunotherapy, and immune-related toxicity. She is the Chair of the lung cancer disease-specific subgroup of Cancer Trials Ireland and the Founder and Chair of the Irish Lung Cancer Alliance research group and of the Irish Immunotherapy Toxicity Network.
Currently, Prof. Naidoo chairs the IASLC Communications Committee. She is also chair of the metastatic immunotherapy track for WCLC 2024. She is a prior winner of the IASLC/LCFA Young Investigator Award (2020) and was named the Irish Cancer Society’s Clinician Research Leader for 2022-2024.
Isabelle Opitz, MD
Dr. Opitz is Director of the Department of Thoracic Surgery and Chair of the Lung Cancer Center at University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland. She is also Professor of Thoracic Surgery at the University of Zurich. Her areas of expertise are the surgical treatment of lung cancer and pleural mesothelioma.
Dr. Opitz served as the 2022-2023 President of the European Society of Thoracic Surgeons after serving as treasurer since 2017 and as a board member since 2012. She is currently the International Director of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery.
Also an active member of the IASLC, Dr. Opitz has served on the IASLC Mesothelioma Taskforce, the staging subcommittee for malignant pleural mesothelioma, and the N-stage committee for NSCLC. In 2022, she was awarded the Robert J. Ginsberg Lectureship Award for Surgery at WCLC.
Noemí Reguart, MD, PhD
Dr. Reguart leads the Thoracic Oncology Unit at Hospital Clinic Barcelona, Spain, and is an active member of the IASLC. She has participated in several scientific committees and has been asked to speak at educational and discussion sessions at several annual World Conferences and other IASLC conferences. She has served on the IASLC Communications Committee since 2020.
Dr. Reguart is also an active member of the European Society for Medical Oncology and has served on its scientific committees for years and lectured at several ESMO conferences. She was the co-chair of 2023 European Lung Cancer Conference. Dr. Reguart also works with the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancers and is an active member of the Spanish Lung Cancer Group.
