A Trinity-hosted conference, featuring global leaders in cancer research, today heard that a “personalised” approach to cancer treatments will be key to expanding understanding of the disease in the future.
The two-day international cancer conference took place today and yesterday at Trinity’s Translational Medicine Institute, with global leaders in cancer research presenting and discussing recent advances in the field.
This new approach to patient care, the conference heard, will allow doctors to select treatments most likely to help patients based on a genetic understanding of their disease.
In a press statement, Paul Browne, a professor of haematology at Trinity College Dublin, said: “This conference brings together local and international clinicians, nurses, allied health professionals, researchers and scientists working in the field of cancer.”
“Our aim”, Browne, “is to discuss exciting new developments in cancer research and treatment, with a view to mapping out new approaches for our cancer patients. We are fortunate to have a distinguished international panel of experts for this important meeting”.
He continued: “The central theme is that each person with cancer requires an individual ‘personalised’ approach based on applying our best scientific knowledge to the particular aspects of their cancer. This may include factors such as cancer genes, changes in the immune system, and the tissue structures in which cancer cells in the body grow.”
“The idea is to design or tailor an individual’s treatment to knowledge of these distinctive factors”, he added.
The conference’s Burkitt lecture, regarded as a highlight of the conference, will this year be delivered by pioneering cancer researcher Dr Mina J Bissel from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California.
Browne said: “We are delighted that Dr Mina Bissel, a world-renowned expert on cancer biology, will give the Burkitt memorial lecture. Her lifetime work has a special emphasis on breast cancer, but with broad relevance to all cancers.”
“She has shown how the tissue architecture and environment in which cancer in individual patients. This has important implications for developing effective treatments for each patient”, he said.
The conference, now in its 11th year, was established through a three-way agreement developed in 1999 by the Departments of Health in Ireland and Northern Ireland and the US administration.
In 2016, a new cancer institute was opened in St James’s Hospital in conjunction with Trinity. The first of its kind in Ireland, the institute aimed to introduce a new national standard in care for patients in the areas of cancer prevention, treatment and survivorship.
In a press statement at the time, Provost Patrick Prendergast said that Trinity and St James’s hoped to “lead the way in innovative new cancer treatment”.
He added that they will be “educating the next generation of cancer clinicians, health professionals and scientists”.
