Life and Matter Sciences Events in 2019

Cancer

Scientists from CNIO and the Weizmann Institute of Science joined to discuss advances in cancer research. Held at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, the event was attended by some of the top scientists from this institution and CNIO. It is the second event organized by CNIO, the Weizmann Institute of Science and Ramón Areces Foundation since they agreed two years ago to collaborate to advance cancer prevention and treatment.

At the scientific event, novel combination therapies and targets for breast or ovarian cancer were presented, as well as the progress of a joint research study on the most aggressive type of skin cancer and the metastases that result from it. During the two-day event, the latest results of the joint project ‘Heterogeneity underlying melanoma metastasis and resistance to immune checkpoint inhibitors’, co-developed by Marisol Soengas from CNIO and Yardena Samuels from the Weizmann Institute of Science, were announced. The goal of this three-year project, funded by the Fundación Ramón Areces, is to explain why melanoma develops malignant metastases throughout the body from a primary tumor only a little over 1 millimeter in thickness.

Throughout the last 50 years huge advance in the knowledge of the molecular basis of the onset and progression of cancer has been achieved. Personalized precision oncology emerges from the ever increasingly accurate and effective development of diagnostic technologies. At the Symposium  Personalized Precision Oncology: current status and future perspectives were presented some strategies that are either successfully used in personalized precision oncology treatments or have the potential to become therapeutic strategies in the immediate future. Personalized medicine has raised some concerns that deserve attention at clinical, ethical, legal and economical levels that will be discussed.

Ras subfamily constitute the gene family most frequently mutated in human cancer. In the meeting The Ras superfamily and related pathways in health and disease special topics of attention were those related to the systems biology of these routes, the analysis of their mechanism of regulation and action, the information derived from animal models, their role in human carcinogenesis, and the new therapeutic avenues that are being developed to manipulate their function.

JOSÉ BASELGA, president of the Fero Foundation and the Scientific Committee of the Vall D'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), used his lecture Advances in the genomics of breast cancer  to speak about liquid biopsy, a hopeful technique and one of the most promising tools in the world of cancer. Its application - to be available within two or three years - would increase the cure of cancer by 25%.

A group of experts gathered at a symposium organized at the Fundación Ramón Areces by the Clínica Universidad de Navarra and its Center for Applied Medical Research (CIMA) made a last hopeful note on cancer research and agreed that Spain has not missed the boat of immunotherapy thanks to the funding from the pharmaceutical industry, the European Union and from organizations such as the Spanish Association Against Cancer (AECC).