Canadian Cancer Research Conference 2015

Several weeks ago now, close to 1000 cancer researchers – scientists, clinicians, mathematicians, investors, and public health officials – from across Canada came together at the Canadian Cancer Research Conference (link) in Montreal, QC, to discuss our insights, successes, questions, and our hopes for cancer research.  Although the disciplines are diverse, we share one common goal: to better prevent, detect, and treat cancer.

This is the third time such a conference has been held in Canada and the second time that I have attended.  Because of the breadth of disciplines attending the event, the wealth of information and the topics are varied and very rarely lend to boredom. 

Although the science can be detailed, and the big ideas mind-bending, there were several moments that struck me in their importance.  For brevity, I will just list them and let you ponder them.  Hopefully, over the next several months, we can delve deeper into these ideas.

Key ideas:

• Imagine a world where we know how each mutation at each nucleotide affects cancer risk – BRCA challenge
• We cannot treat our way out of cancer – we need to integrate prevention, detection with treatment; majority of cancers have a lifestyle or environmental cause
• Biomarkers: use biology to inform design – does it make sense based on what we know? 
• The microenvironment plays a critical role
• Immunotherapy: using the immune system to kill cancer
• Immunotherapy: cancer vaccines that both kill cancer and provide long-term protection against that cancer.  How cool!
• Incidental findings – what do you do when you sequence a genome and find some unrelated clinically relevant mutation?  Does the patient want to know?  Do we have an obligation to inform?
• Personalized medicine: how to you present data on single patient?  What is significant?  Every patient is different.
• Personalized medicine: how to you present data on single patient?  What is significant?  Every patient is different.
• Our ability to detect aberrations that drive cancer, that needs to be targeted, has out-paced our ability to target those genes – this is basic research and drug development!
• We are not going to reach the promise of personalized medicine until we understand the cellular context and impact of all cellular components involved – again BASIC research.  This spoken by a clinician!

·     I was inspired (and very tired) at the end of the 3-day conference to carry out my cancer research in my new postdoctoral position!