What was the topic of your moderation?
The session that I’m moderating is molecular oncology and translational medicine, and it’s really about developing new strategies for treatments. Some of this is early stage, some of it is going through preclinical trials, and I think it’s really intriguing, different cancers that are being looked at right now.
What will we hear about in this session?
What you’re going to hear in this particular session is that there’s going to be a new development for treatment of glioblastoma. There’s also going to be some work that’s being done on developing a new biospecimen resource, which is focused on underrepresented minorities. This is a typical problem in many clinical trials, in that most clinical trials are not well represented by a diverse population, so what we’re really looking at is can we start to bring more diversity into these studies so that people better understand why certain therapeutics will work with some groups and not with others. So that’s one of the areas we’re going to be discussing in this session.
What is the MCIFAU Cancer Center of Excellence?
So the MCIFAU Cancer Center of Excellence allows us to really look at cancer from multiple perspectives. We can start out from very basic research, trying to understand just simple mechanisms of how certain cancers may initiate or progress, and then we can start to go through translational aspects of it - can you develop new therapeutic agents, can you develop new diagnostic tools? Obviously the long-term goal is then to get that to the patients so we can have a good feedback mechanism between the oncologists who are treating patients and the researchers who are trying to develop these new strategies. To understand what the problems are out there, what are some of the practical solutions, how can we just all work better to take research and move it forward so that it really affects patients in a very positive way.
