Despite substantial improvements in recent decades, the prognosis for those cancer patients who suffer from metastatic disease and depend on systemic drug therapy remains poor. Both intrinsic resistance and the formation of acquired drug resistance substantially affects the efficacy of cancer drugs. The advancement of precision medicine approaches holds promise for both the effective guidance of therapies to patients that will respond and the ability to monitor this tumour response. This will require the successful interpretation of ‘omics’ data and a close collaboration between pre-clinical researchers, clinicians, and computational biologists in both academia and industry to develop these strategies. This conference will bring together and showcase cancer researchers from these areas, who will present and discuss the latest advances in understanding the mechanisms of drug resistance in cancer, the identification of biomarkers of drug sensitivity/resistance and how they can be linked to precision medicine approaches.
Topics to include:
- Molecular mechanisms of resistance
- Genomics, systems biology and tumour evolution
- Models of tumour resistance
- Immuno-oncology and therapy
Location: University of Kent, Canterbury