Annette Bakker | CEO
Childrens Tumor Foundation
ANNETTE BAKKER, Ph.D., CEO — CHILDREN’S TUMOR FOUNDATION (CTF), Chair (ad interim) of CTF Europe Annette Bakker, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, was an academic researcher for ten years - University Antwerp, Yale Medical School, and the Myology Institute Paris. Following this, she accumulated 15 years of experience in multiple executive leadership positions in Oncology R&D in big pharma and biotech. She holds over 50 publications and 5 patents (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8420-7831). Motivated by the realization that numerous groundbreaking discoveries fail to translate into clinical benefit, she joined the Children’s Tumor Foundation (CTF) in 2011 to deploy CTF's talent, time, and treasure (TTT) to help bridge the gaps between scientific discoveries and clinical benefits, particularly focusing on neurofibromatosis, a rare genetic disorder. In 2022, she was decorated Officer in the Order of Leopold by the king of Belgium for her bold approach and dedication to improving patients' lives. Annette strongly believes that patient-centric research foundations hold a unique position in the R&D ecosystem. Organizations, such as CTF, are trusted partners for all stakeholders, with the same sense of urgency as the patients. As a FasterCures Changemaker and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative mentor, Annette is deeply committed to constructing an enterprise that not only benefits patients with NF but serves as a model for expediting drug discovery and development within the broader rare disease community.
Appearances:
Day 1 - World Orphan Drug Congress USA 2026 @ 15:30
Beyond the Single Biomarker: Advancing Rare Disease Insights with AI
The goal of the panel is to move beyond the usual high-level conversations and instead focus on the practical ingredients needed to build truly actionable biomarkers. In particular, we want to highlight three dimensions that must come together:
Affordable data – Dave Zhang from BioState AI will discuss how new sequencing platforms combined with AI/ML analysis are dramatically reducing the cost of generating high-quality molecular data.
Accessible data–Maxine Chan, a patient advocate and health researcher, will discuss data quality as an opportunity to improve patient care and drive higher-quality research insights.
Available multimodal data – Ali Bashashati, in digital pathology and large-scale image analysis and Angela Hirbe on liquid biopsies to predict malignant transformation, beautifully illustrate how new tools are enabling researchers to interrogate enormous datasets and extract meaningful biological signals.
The central message of the panel is simple: breakthrough biomarkers will not come from a single data modality. They will emerge when genomics, clinical data, and imaging are integrated thoughtfully.
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