WIN 2011, 6-8 July, 2011, Paris

WIN 2011: Efficacy of diagnostics and therapeutics

Dr Vladimir Lazar – Institute Gustave Roussy, Paris, France

WIN Symposium is dedicated to very important and challenging topics - the efficacy of diagnostics and therapeutics. This is challenging because today most of the cancers, especially lung cancers, are diagnosed in late stage. 75% of lung cancers, the diagnosis is made in late metastatic stage and efficacy of therapeutics is to try to get a few months supplementary for survival. So the meeting has the purpose to put together experts from pharmaceutical companies, from biotechnology industry, from academia and from patient advocacy in order to reflect together to the best strategies, how to improve the efficacy. And the outcome is that diagnosis must be done in earlier stages and therapeutics have to be adapted to the characteristics of each tumour and each population. I think that the unique point and the unique feature of this symposium is this capacity to bring together all the experts around the same table. The sessions were very much appreciated and we have big conferences and great names that put together their expert views and I think they are nice outcomes and guidelines, how to improve the efficacy of clinical trials, of therapeutics and of diagnosis.

What are some of the specifics?

How to combine efficiently targeted therapeutics; how to study the mechanism of resistance. We have today nice drugs which are efficient but then we have resistance and the tumour escapes the therapeutics. So I think that the big novelty brought in this symposium is that scientists started to understand what are the mechanisms of resistance and how to target the different pathways, different genes in order to make therapeutics successful. So this symposium is much focussing on a combination of therapeutics. This is challenging because you may have therapeutics for different company portfolios and it’s impressive to see that this works.