Today sees the start of the 50th annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago. The conference is one of the most important in the world of cancer research and treatment.
Representatives from The Institute of Cancer Research, London, will join 25,000 other delegates to forge new collaborations, share their findings and gain insights into the latest fields of interest. Researchers from The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) are involved in more than 20 of the presentations on research that ranges from risk classification in the developing world to the use of cell-free DNA as a source of biomarkers.
Professor Paul Workman, Deputy Chief Executive and incoming Interim Chief Executive of the ICR, will give an invited talk in a prestigious 50th Anniversary session. He will talk about the implications of so-called multi-omics tumour profiling – involving the combined use of several different technologies – for future drug discovery and development, as well as for the implementation of personalized, precision treatment in the clinic. His presentation will illustrate recently published work from the ICR on the opportunities and challenges associated with ‘drugging the cancer genome’. He will discuss approaches to overcoming drug resistance – specifically the potential of Hsp90 molecular chaperone inhibitors. And in a new area of research for the ICR, he will discuss a powerful new technology providing metabolomic biomarkers of PI3 kinase inhibition.
Professor Johann de Bono, Director of the Drug Development Unit at the ICR and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, will chair an education session on Moving Forward in Advanced Prostate Cancer Clinical Drug Development, which will include a presentation by him on tumour molecular characterisation and the clinical utility of circulating biomarker assays. His team are also presenting first in man and first in class trial data of a selective p110beta inhibitor for PTEN loss patients at a Poster-Discussion session.
Dr Timothy Yap, NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer in medical oncology at the ICR and The Royal Marsden is a discussant in the Clinical Science Symposium on Rational Combinations of Targeted Therapies. And Professor Kevin Harrington, Joint Head of the Division of Radiotherapy and Imaging at the ICR and The Royal Marsden, will present a talk on a phase III trial that examines the efficacy of administering adjuvant postoperative lapatinib in patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck.
Poster presentations constitute the rest of the ICR’s contribution. Professor Johann de Bono, Dr Gerhardt Attard and Dr Udai Banerji contribute jointly to one that discusses the feasibility of using next-generation sequencing of cell-free plasma DNA as a predictive and response biomarker.
Several posters highlight first-in-man Phase I trials including drugs targeting TORC1/2, PARP, tubulin and IGF-1/2. Other key posters describe tissue mRNA biomarkers associating with response to abiraterone acetate in advanced prostate cancer, prognostic models for prostate and ovarian cancers, and studies of the neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio as a prognostic biomarker in Phase I trial patients.
Dr Banerji’s work forms the subject of another poster that presents the results of a phase I trial examining doses up to 20mg of the promising multi-AGC kinase inhibitor, AT13148 discovered jointly by ICR scientists and Astex Pharmaceuticals.
Professor Andrew Pearson, Cancer Research UK Professor of Paediatric Oncology at the ICR and Honorary Consultant in Paediatric Oncology at The Royal Marsden, is a member of international collaborations whose work is to be shared in three poster presentations: one examining the effectiveness of dabrafenib in paediatric patients with certain kinds of solid tumours, a second presenting the results of a trial investigating the effect of immunotherapy for high-risk neuroblastoma, and a third presenting a neuroblastoma risk classification model for developing countries.