BIDMC Cancer Symposium
BIDMC's Three Day Cancer Symposium Featured Remarks From the BIDMC Research Community
Date: 10/24/2008
BIDMC Contact: Zineb Marchoudi
Phone: (617) 667-7305
Email: zmarchou@bidmc.harvard.edu
The first annual BIDMC Cancer Symposium began on Wednesday October 22 with opening remarks from several members of the BIDMC community.
Mark Zeidel, MD, Chair, Department of Medicine, lauded BIDMC for its outstanding cancer care and said the Cancer Center adds to that clinical prowess an emphasis on cancer research. “We will be seeing great things in terms of discoveries and novel ideas coming out of this institution in the coming years,” he said. “This is going to be a gem of a cancer center for many years to come.”
The Cancer Center’s inaugural three-day symposium, “Defining New Frontiers to Eradicate Cancer,” brings together cancer research experts from multiple institutions. Talks will focus on the next generation of targeted therapies for cancer and includes a keynote address from Nobel Laureate Phillip Sharp, PhD, Institute Professor at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. Click here to read about Sharp’s address.
“It is exciting that in the last five years, we are seeing success in curing cancers previously not curable, for the most part through targeted therapies,” said Lewis Cantley, MD, Director of the Cancer Center.
As an example, in his opening remarks, Pier-Paolo Pandolfi, MD, Chief of the Division of Genetics, presented his co-clinical trial model for accelerating the discovery and validation of such targeted therapies. He employed this method, which involves pre-clinical drug testing on mouse models of cancer in parallel with clinical trials, in his work on acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL). This same approach, he said, could be applied to other types of cancer. “Fifteen years ago, APL was a fatal killer and now it is curable, if not eradicated, with targeted therapies,” Pandolfi said. “In the context of APL, the post-chemotherapy era has started.”
Cantley noted that discovering new targeted therapies is challenging work that, to be successful, must be approached logically. “The theme of this symposium is to bring together people who have made extremely important basic science discoveries, people who are moving those discoveries forward into the clinic, and people figuring out ways to identify patients who respond to targeted drugs,” said Cantley.
Click here to read about the keynote speach by Nobel Laureate Phillip Sharp.
Click here to read about BIDMC researchers who spoke at a mini-symposium focused on prostate cancer.
