Special Lecture: “Molecular Pathological Epidemiology in Action: A New Paradigm for Cancer Research and Precision Medicine”

Dr. Behnoush Abedi-Ardekani is a double board-certified surgical and clinical pathologist with over 30 years of experience spanning diagnostic pathology, molecular pathological epidemiology, and international cancer research. She currently serves at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC/WHO), where she leads efforts in high-impact, multinational studies including the Mutographs and prominent projects, both part of the Cancer Grand Challenges initiative.

Her work focuses on standardizing and leading the centralized pathology workflow,  including quality-controlled biobanking, integrating digital pathology, frozen tissue reporting, and integration of morphological features into molecular data in the context of, large-scale cancer studies. She has focused interest on pancreatic lesions and is expanding her networking to advance in this filed. Dr. Abedi-Ardekani collaborates closely with Stanford’s Prof. Emma Lundberg on spatial proteomics, including the design of organ-specific antibody panels and histological interpretation of multiplex data. She has access to the unique Mutographs’ biorepository-that she played a key role in its development- containing 15,000 frozen paired tumor-peritumoarl  samples, almost 25,000 high-quality whole slide images with annotated pathology data and epidemiologic metadata IARC’s high-throughput tissue imaging platform, and global collaborations, independent to IARC, with pancreatic pathology experts in France and the world’s largest autopsy center in São Paulo, Brazil.

This session will explore her translational work across tumor biology, tissue science, and systems pathology, and is open to anyone interested in digital pathology, cancer mechanisms, or large-cohort research.