On 3 and 4 December the Convention Center of Hesperia L’Hospitalet will hold the IDIBELL Cancer Conference on Personalized Cancer Medicine. The conference will bring together a hundred of researchers around the world. The purpose of the meeting is to highlight recent advances in the biology and natural history of cancer provides new targets for therapy and to analyze in depth the molecular mechanisms involved in the stratification of patents according to oncology recently described molecular markers.
The conference is organized by the IDIBELL researchers Manel Esteller, George Thomas, Cristina Muñoz-Pinedo and Sara Kozma. The event has the support of Instituto Roche.
New drugs
The most illustrative case was that of the chronic myeloid leukemia, a subtype of cancer of the white blood cells, which had a very poor prognosis a few years ago and now it has a high survival. How was it? It was designed a drug that inhibits a specific genetic lesion of this leukaemia not present on healthy cells, an inhibitor of tyrosine kinase.
Another example. Since the discovery by an researcher that a quarter of breast tumours, instead of having two copies of a gene that causes cancer (oncogene) have more than twenty, there were designed drugs that bind to and block this oncogene, increasing the survival of these patients.
The latest example is based in the fact that cancer cells get “chemical restraint” inhibitor genes to tumours. Thanks to this discovery, new drugs are used in leukaemia and lymphoma acting taking this “stop” signal and allow the correct expression. Thus, the tumour becomes to resemble normal tissue.
These new drugs are needed, not only to cure or improve survival, but also to do so with a proper quality of life. IDIBELL Congress in personalized cancer medicine puts together the best experts in the field to find new targets for therapy in cancer patients.
Epigenetics and cell repair
The speakers are leading scientists in the field of oncology and cancer research, particularly in the study of genetic and epigenetic profiles to customize the treatment of patients and develop new drugs. The conference will run for two days and bring together a select group of twenty speakers and more than a hundred participants. Special attention will be devoted to epigenetics, DNA repair, metabolism and cell signaling and its relationship to the current clinical applications.
IDIBELL Cancer Conference on Personalized Cancer Medicine will feature presentations by international experts:
Scott Armstrong, Alberto Bardelli, René Bernards, Manel Esteller, Douglas R. Green, Manuel Hidalgo, Michael Karin, Jonathan Knowles, Sara Kozma, Guido Kroemer, Nick B. La Tangue, Stig Linder, Tak Mak, Brendan D. Manning, Cristina Muñoz, Rafael Rossell, Ramón Salazar, Josep Tabernero, George Thomas and Christopher Vakoc.