I’m here because I think this is an important course to help train young oncologists and cancer scientists in how to do translational research well. I’ve actually been involved with this course from its very beginning so this is my fourth or fifth time here over the years. I always find it invigorating and enlightening and hopefully it’s having an impact on the careers of these young scientists.
What did you present here?
I gave one of the introductory lectures on the course where I tried to weigh out a big picture overview because many of the students are not clinicians and so although they’re very much involved in cancer research they’re not involved in cancer care. So, as a clinician I try to point out to them what we need to know to optimally deliver care to our patients – how we diagnose cancer, how we stage the extent of disease, how we assess the prognosis, how we select particular therapies and where the unmet medical needs are and how some of the newer technologies, genomics, RNA expression profiles and so on, are beginning to find their way into clinical practice. Because ultimately the research that these young people are doing is going to provide a new suite of tools and drugs and so on, we hope, that will find their way into clinical practice and further improve the outcomes for cancer patients over the years.
How does this meeting stand out?
They have terrific students, although many meetings have terrific students. This is a meeting that is very broad in scope. If you look at the range of topics that are considered from the very beginning until the very end of a long week it goes really from basic cancer biology all the way through population, health outcomes, health economics and everything in between. So in that way it’s different from many courses because it is founded on a broad definition of translational research, that translational research is not necessarily only bench to bedside but it can be bedside to population and it can be in the reverse order, from population to clinic and then back to the bench. So therefore the course encompasses all of these aspects of cancer research and it’s important even for our basic scientists to understand that the ultimate impact of their work depends upon a patient’s ability to access care and access the particular treatment that seems best for that patient. That’s often determined by the country you live in, the healthcare system you live in, the resources that are available. So even if you’re a basic laboratory researcher, understanding a little bit about the health economics at the other end of the spectrum is really important.
Collaboration appears to be a key aspect of the meeting, then?
I think that certainly a major goal of this meeting is to bring these students who are working at the leading cancer centres in Europe and other great institutions around the world, to bring them together in an environment where they can get to know each other and establish some collaborations that hopefully will continue long after this course is over with. It’s interesting in seeing the poll of the audience that there are biologists here, there are physicists here, there are chemists here, and so this is the kind of interaction that we need to bring different perspectives together to figure out how to solve the cancer problem.
Do you have a take-home message?
My take-home message in a sense is that if these students are representative of the current state of cancer research then the future is bright. Because the students are smart, they’re motivated, they’re working on cutting edge projects. They’re intensely collaborative and they see the value of data sharing and of that sort of collaboration. So we’ve come a long way in recent years in treating cancer, we still have quite a ways to go but these are the students who are going to carry us forward and I think they’re going to continue to make a lot of progress very quickly.
