Jan Geissler

"Cancer patients urgently need effective and tolerable therapies that prolong survival while maintaining quality of life. Precision oncology has great potential to identify optimal therapies based on the patient’s genomic profile and disease trajectory, but evidence is needed to live up to that promise. The global registry WAYFIND-R is a huge step forward, collecting genetic profiling data from cancer patients to advance the understanding of individual disease characteristics and their impact on outcomes. Being a patient advocate and cancer survivor myself, I contribute to the WAYFIND-R Steering Committee to ensure that patients’ expectations on the value, methodology, outcomes, and communication are implemented in this important registry."

Jan Geissler is founder and CEO of Patvocates, a think tank, consultancy and social enterprise on patient advocacy and patient engagement in research. From 2012-2017, he has been working for the European Patients' Forum as the Director of the European Patients Academy (EUPATI), a project funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI). In the one of Europe's largest "Big Data" projects, the IMI-funded EU projects HARMONY and HARMONY-PLUS, he is co-leading the work package on stakeholder input from patient organisations, HTA bodies, regulators and other stakeholders.

After graduating with a university diploma in business, Jan worked for the media company Bertelsmann, Germany, and in 2003, he joined Vodafone Group R&D where he headed business modelling teams in Germany and The Netherlands. In 2001, Jan started engaging in cancer advocacy, after his diagnosis of a rare cancer, Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia (CML) at the age of 28 years. In 2008 Jan decided to leave the telecommunications and media business and focused his professional life on patient advocacy.

He joined a phase I/II clinical trial and started to translate and publish medical publications into German lay language. Jan co-founded several patient networks, including the online patient community Leukämie-Online/LeukaNET, the CML Advocates Network, the European Cancer Patient Coalition, the Acute Leukemia Advocates Network (ALAN) and the Workgroup of European Cancer Patient Advocacy Network (WECAN).

Jan is a patients' representative in various steering committees and advisory boards and acts as an independent expert in committees and panels of the EU Commission. He is also member of the Ethics Committee of the Bavarian Chamber of Physicians. In 2016, he was awarded with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his work as a patient advocate

LINK: https://www.patvocates.net/about-patvocates/jan-geissler/