This is a course in translational cancer research and this is actually my field of expertise. So I’m here to teach these talented young PhD students how to perform translational cancer research with a view to the clinical problems in oncology. So I told them that in our lab we start by defining the clinical problem and then we go backwards in the lab and do a lot of research and then we raise hypotheses based on the results from the research and then we go back and test the hypothesis in a clinical setting.

Do you wish this had been available to you when you were starting out?

I think the mentor role was different at that time; you were on your own often. But on the other hand, I also had good mentors mainly in basic research so obviously I would have liked to have more and better mentors in the clinical area.

Have you found this meeting useful in addressing that lack?

This is the way to do it and to generate some discussions among the PhD students to help them to realise that if they want to have success with what they are doing in the future and, for me, success is for cancer research that you change daily clinical routine work with cancer patients to the benefit of the patients, then they need to understand how you promote your research into a clinical setting.

How does this meeting stand out compared with others you’ve been to?

There are different reasons, first of all that you have gathered an international, highly ranked faculty to teach the students. Secondly, you bring students together from different countries and you train an international network. Hopefully they will be able to collaborate also in the future. For me personally the networking has been extremely important in my career, so having people around that you know and they trust you, you trust them and so on and you can call them and say, ‘Could we do this together?’ and you feel confident that they will do it and they will not bypass you or anything. So this is very, very important and a meeting like this creates these types of networks. In some way, and that might sound strange, but it’s more easy to create a sustainable network in an international environment than if they stayed at home and did the same just in our country.

What’s the take-home message?

The take-home message is if you are going to be a PhD student try to attend some of these meetings. If you are a supervisor try to motivate your students to participate in these meetings. Then, again, try to understand the clinical scenario of cancer patients – where are their problems and then go back to your lab and see if you can solve some of the problems. Instead of just doing research and hopefully something will come out that somebody will pick and bring it somewhere, that’s not way it should be.