The prestigious European cancer association Cancer Core Europe (CCE) joint forces again with its members and set up a special online event to replace this year’s summer school for PhD students, Postdocs and researching clinicians, which had been cancelled due to given circumstances around COVID-19 earlier this year. The event was organized by the NCT Heidelberg. The hosts were CCE and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ).
With around 400 participants from all over the world, the event took place on Tuesday, October 13 and included four presentations by renowned researchers and researching physicians from Europe and the USA as well as a series of plenary discussions.
Seminal scientific Topics of Cancer Research
In line with CCE's overriding goal of rapidly translating the results of current cancer research into practice and thus benefiting patients directly, CCE Chairman and Director of the Netherlands Cancer Institute Emile Voest gave an overview of the network's visions for the future. He emphasized the role of CCE as a link between modern high-tech infrastructure and clinical studies and mentioned various approaches with which CCE is driving forward the improvement of care.
Jean-Charles Soria, General Director of Gustave Roussy and Member of the CCE Board of Directors in France, presented in his talk the reasons for the change of drug development paradigm since the early 2000s and elaborated the determining factors. The examination of the cancer genome topic by Núria Lopez-Bigas from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) Barcelona was also of very high interest for the participants. Lopez-Bigas is specialized in the research of cancer genomes and driver mutations. Her talk dealt with the genome-wide analysis of mutation signatures as well as their development, also in connection with chemotherapy, and the resulting effects on tumor-genesis.
The renowned biologist and founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Robert A. Weinberg, closed the session with his lecture on "Malignant Progression and Metastasis".
Although the event had to be held online this time and chairs remained empty, we are still looking back at a very insightful day and fruitful discussions. Thanks to all speakers and participants!
Save the Date: Summer School 2021
Keep your calendars blocked for the upcoming Summer School, taking place October 10-15, 2021 in Portugal. More information will be shared soon on the CCE Website.
About Cancer Core Europe
Cancer Core Europe brings together the expertise and critical mass required to effectively move translational research into the clinic, bringing breakthrough discoveries to benefit patients at an appropriate cost. Providing an environment where basic, translational, and clinical research occur side-by-side in our centers means that patients can benefit directly from experimental findings. Likewise, observations made in the clinic inform research being carried out. Cancer Core Europe, with the support of patient advocates, embraces this patient-centered approach. Sharing is essential—the complementary expertise of each center will sustain a common infrastructure providing patients with access to cutting-edge therapies, targeted for each patient and including immune therapies. Collective efforts to pool information from clinical, environmental, genomic, imaging and immune biology databases, will transform clinicians’ and researchers’ approaches to cancer research, thereby permitting a deeper understanding than any single center could achieve on its own. Dissemination of findings to the public and specialists and training the future generation of oncologists will contribute to improving cancer health care in Europe.