Overview:
The Management Committee is responsible for overseeing the strategic operations of ICGC ARGO. Membership includes Individuals with expertise and capacity in secretariat responsibilities, project development, technology development and business development, who are strategically located in global regions where ICGC ARGO projects are concentrated.
2026 Management Committee Members:
Takayuki Yoshino (Chair)
National Cancer Centre Hospital East, Japan
Dr. Takayuki Yoshino, M.D., Ph.D., currently works at the National Cancer Center Hospital East in Chiba, Japan, where he is the Deputy Director of Hospital, Director, Department of Global Oncology, Head, Division for the Promotion of Drug and Diagnostic Development, and Chief for the Department of Gastrointestinal Oncology.
Dr. Yoshino has a particular interest in chemotherapy for gastrointestinal cancers, especially for colorectal cancer, where he focuses on various investigational new agents and translational research regarding potential predictive and prognostic biomarkers. He has had over 500 peer-review scholar journal publications on CRC. In addition, he holds several professional appointments, serving on a chair of Pan-Asian adapted ESMO Guideline for CRC, a member of ASCO Annual Meeting Scientific Program Committee on the Gastrointestinal Cancer, an advisory committee member of ASCO Breakthrough, The Lancet Oncology international advisory board, and the Chairman of both JSCO and JSMO. He was the first Japanese plenary speaker at ASCO 2022 Annual Meeting (5th /JUN/ 2022).
Andrew Biankin
University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
Andrew Biankin is a surgeon-scientist and Director of the Wolfson Wohl Cancer Research Centre at the University of Glasgow, where he established the Glasgow Precision Oncology Laboratory in 2016. Professor Biankin is also Chair of the UK-wide Precision-Panc programme of clinical trials for patients with pancreatic cancer. In 2019, Professor Biankin was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for distinguished service to medical research, and to the treatment of pancreatic cancer, as a clinician-scientist.
Professor Biankin is a strong supporter of the concept of ‘learning healthcare systems’ that deliver the kind of large datasets that precision medicine needs to allow researchers to continually refine current treatments and develop new ones.
Amber Johns
Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Australia
Amber Johns is a multi-disciplinary researcher and program leader working at the intersection of science, technology, and policy. Over 20 years, she has established and led some of the most ambitious international research programs in cancer.
As Project Manager of the Australian Pancreatic Cancer Genome Initiative (APGI), Amber built one of the world's largest pancreatic cancer biobank networks, with international linkage. The APGI produced the first comprehensive map of the pancreatic cancer genome, as part of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC). She now serves as Program Developer for ICGC ARGO, uniting genomic research programs across more than 13 countries with a target cohort of over 100,000 cancer patients. Amber brings a rare combination of clinical, community, and scientific expertise across academia, global consortia, and government, and has been instrumental in the establishment of international research policy frameworks. She has worked with investigators and institutions across Europe, East Asia, North America, and Australia, consistently turning complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives into landmark programs.
Rita Lawlor
University of Verona, Italy
Rita T. Lawlor is a Health Research, ICT and privacy professional with 25 years’ management experience and a proven record of leading health and research innovation and delivering results. She has held Directorships and leading positions in biobanking and research organizations and has extensive international experience. Rita Lawlor is co-founder of the ARC-Net applied cancer research centre where she coordinates research activities and runs the cancer biobank.
She has extensive project management experience and managed the Italian initiative in ICGC and is co-PI for the ARGO project. She currently coordinates the national Italian Cancer Research Association funded project “Clinically applicable biomarkers to early diagnosis, patient risk stratification and therapeutic response in pancreas cancer. She is a steering committee member of IARC's BC-NET and board member of the Italian Foundation for Pancreas Diseases (FIMP), and former director of ISBER and past president of ESBB.
Rita is originally a Computer Science graduate with a doctorate in translational biomedical sciences in Oncological Pathology. More recently she was conferred with a fellow of Information Privacy from IAPP (International Association of Privacy Professionals) and is chair of the ISBER GDPR Task Force.
Riu Yamashita
National Cancer Centre Hospital East, Japan
Riu Yamashita, Ph.D. is Unit Leader of the Division of Translational Informatics at the National Cancer Center Japan. He is also a Visiting Associate Professor at The University of Tokyo and a Visiting Professor at Tokyo University of Science. He received his Ph.D. in Bioscience from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in 2005.
He began his career at The University of Tokyo, where he worked at the Human Genome Center and the Institute of Medical Science. From 2012 to 2018, he served as an Associate Professor at the Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization, contributing to large-scale genomics and biobank projects. Since 2018, he has led translational informatics research at the National Cancer Center Japan.
His laboratory, located within the National Cancer Center Hospital East adjacent to the University of Tokyo Kashiwa Campus, conducts translational cancer research using large-scale clinical and multi-omics datasets. His research focuses on cancer genomics, bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, spatial omics, metagenomics, and precision oncology. His group develops computational methods and databases that integrate genomic, transcriptomic, microbiome, spatial, and clinical data for biomarker discovery and therapeutic development.
Takao Fujisawa
National Cancer Centre Hospital East, Japan
Takao Fujisawa, M.D., Ph.D., is Chief at the National Cancer Center Hospital East, Japan, where he holds roles across the Translational Research Sample Management Office, the Translational Research Support Office, and the Department of Head and Neck Medical Oncology. He completed his M.D. at Kyoto University Faculty of Medicine in 2011 and his Ph.D. in Medicine at Juntendo University Graduate School of Medicine in 2025. Following clinical training at Kobe City Medical Center General Hospital and Kameda General Hospital, he joined the National Cancer Center Hospital East in 2016, where his work spans clinical oncology and translational research connecting genomic analysis to precision medicine initiatives, including contributions to ICGC-ARGO.
Jianmin Wu
Peking University Cancer Hospital & Institute, China
Dr. Jianmin Wu is a Professor and Director of Center for Cancer Bioinformatics at Peking University Cancer Hospital & Institute in Beijing, China. Dr Wu received his B.S. in Biology from Shandong University (2001) and Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Peking University, China (2006). He started focusing on cancer during his postdoctoral fellow training at University of Helsinki in Finland (2006–2010). Prior to his current appointment, he served as Head of the Cancer Bioinformatics Group at Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia (2010–2015). He is interested in data-driven cancer research, by applying computational, genomic and functional approaches to characterize patient cohorts and patient-derived tumor organoids, for advancing precision oncology.
Melanie Courtot
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Canada
Melanie Courtot is the Director of Genome Informatics and a Principal Investigator at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR). Her team develops new software, databases and other necessary components to store, organize and compute over the large and complex datasets being generated by OICR’s cancer research programs. Melanie is passionate about translational informatics - building intelligent systems to gain new insights and impact human health. Prior to joining OICR in January 2022, she was the metadata standards coordinator for the archival and infrastructure team at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), where she designed tools to streamline multi-omics submissions and developed integrated metadata strategies across the institute’s archival resources and other projects such as FAIRPlus, focusing on data quality, semantic enrichment, and standardization for pharmaceutical and cohort data respectively.
We thank the former members of the ICGC ARGO Management Committee across our initial phases. Their leadership and expertise were instrumental in shaping the scientific and governance foundations of the program.