Dr Julia Glade Bender

Dr Julia Glade Bender is Vice Chairman for Clinical Research in the Department of Pediatrics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK Kids), New York.

She has spent the majority of her career leading highly productive paediatric early drug development programs focused on relapsed and refractory solid tumours with the goal of introducing novel agents into upfront therapy for neuroblastoma and sarcoma.

Her primary translational work has been on the clinical development of targeted agents which inhibit growth pathways and manipulate the tumour microenvironment, as well as laboratory and imaging biomarkers predictive of response and recurrence. More recently, her research has focused on the clinical implementation of precision oncology and deciphering how genomics can inform individual therapy choices.

While perhaps best recognized internationally for her expertise in paediatric anti-angiogenesis, she has provided broad scientific leadership for early phase clinical trial development sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the Children’s Oncology Group (COG), as well as smaller disease-oriented consortia and pharmaceutical industry.

She has chaired, co-chaired or vice-chaired 17 national phase 1/ 2 trials and currently serves as consultant to the Paediatric Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee (ODAC) of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), co-chair of the Committee on Target and Agent Prioritization for Pediatric NCI-MATCH (Pediatric Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice) and the lead COG investigator for the forthcoming NCI-ComboMATCH.