On September 20th and 21st 2018, the first Oncobell symposium on “Mechanisms of cancer and new therapeutic strategies” will take place in the Auditorium of Bellvitge University Hospital (HUB). Oncobell is the research program of Bellviteg Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) that focuses on molecular mechanisms and experimental therapies in cancer. The program comprises 19 groups with researchers linked to IDIBELL as well as the Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO) and HUB.

Oncobell researchers and external key opinion leaders will be in charge of presenting the latest lines of research in cancer within a program that features individual papers grouped into four major themes (clinical research, cancer genetics, drug resistance and microenvironment, and targeting of signaling pathways), keynote lectures by international researchers such as Douglas Hanahan (ISREC, Switzerland), Joseph Schlessinger (Yale University, USA) and René Bernards, (NKI, Amsterdam) and poster sessions.

As an opening to the symposium, a session entitled “Cancer from you to you” will take place on Wednesday 19th. This session, aimed at patients, relatives, patient associations and the general public, will discuss this disease and its implications from different perspectives as part of the cycle “Research and Health, we are close to you”, which offers health and research talks throughout the year in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.

All research groups of the Oncobell program, coordinated by Dr. Ramon Salazar, fight against cancer in a collective and multidisciplinary way, covering all stages, from basic research to the clinical treatment of patients. The common objective of the program is to improve the patient’s prognosis, using studies at the molecular and signaling pathways level, or through the definition of unmet clinical needs for each disease.