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The international conference “Towards personalized cancer medicine”, the XI Symposium of the “Fundació La Marató de TV3”, and the first “Talència Divulga” Award are held coordinately in Barcelona this week.
Toward personalized cancer medicine
From Wednesday 19 until Friday 21 May, The New York Academy of Sciences, Talència and the Social Programme of “la Caixa”, with the support of other international and Catalan organizations, including the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), are holding an international conference in Barcelona on personalized cancer medicine, one of the hot topics of current scientific debate. The congress will be preceded by a dissemination session open to the general public in which Nobel Laureate in Medicine J. Michael Bishop will give a conference “The Cancer Genome and Therapeutics”, which will open a programme of plenary multidisciplinary sessions.
The aim of the congress is to explore the individualized nature of cancer and the impact that the most recent breakthroughs in research into this disease could have on complete personalization of cancer medicine in the near future, which includes aspects such as predisposition, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and the development of new therapies.
The congress organizing committee is formed, amongst others, by IRB Barcelona, through its adjunct director Joan Massagué, the Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), represented by Josep Baselga, and the Institute of Predictive and Personalized Medicine of Cancer (IMPCC), by Manuel Perucho.
The plenary sessions will be as follows: Cancer Biology (processes that lead to cancer); Genetics and Epigenetics (susceptibility to cancer); Oncogenomics and Tumour Characterization; Biomarkers for Prognosis/Response to Treatment: Impact on Clinical Assays; Directed Therapies against Cancer; and a Workshop on New Technologies.
Two previous dissemination activities
On Monday 17, two acts in Barcelona devoted to oncology and scientific dissemination have been organized. In the morning, the 11th Symposium of the “Fundació La Marató de TV3” will be held and in the afternoon the “Talència Divulga” Award will be presented to the lawyer, economist and scientific communicator Eduard Punset. This act will take place in the auditorium of the “Generalitat de Catalunya”.
In the Symposium of the “Fundació La Marató de TV3”, 31 researchers will present the breakthroughs in cancer achieved with funding from the 2004 “La Marató”. Among these projects, three are coordinated by researchers at IRB Barcelona. Miquel Coll (IBMB_CSIC/IRB Barcelona) has developed the project “Epigenic regulatory proteins of chromatin as targets in anticancer strategies” (see video), which is related to an improvement in cancer treatment. Manuel Palacín has coordinated the project “Role of 4F2hc in tumorigenesis” (see video), within studies linked to cancer physiology. And finally, Antoni Riera has worked on the “Identification of specific inhibitors of the transcriptional activity of the betacatenin in tumour progression”, which lies in the field of cancer prognosis.
About IRB Barcelona
The Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) pursues a society free of disease. To this end, it conducts multidisciplinary research of excellence to cure cancer and other diseases linked to ageing. It establishes technology transfer agreements with the pharmaceutical industry and major hospitals to bring research results closer to society, and organises a range of science outreach activities to engage the public in an open dialogue. IRB Barcelona is an international centre that hosts 400 researchers and more than 30 nationalities. Recognised as a Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence since 2011, IRB Barcelona is a CERCA centre and member of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST).
