On June 7-8, 2013, the international symposium "Paediatric Cancer Research at the INTERFACE" took place at the historic venue of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Austria, organised by the Children´s Cancer Research Institute (CCRI) - celebrating its 25th anniversary - and in cooperation with ENCCA (European Network for Cancer Research in Children and Adolescents) and ASSET (Analysing and Striking the Sensitivities of Embryonal Tumours). This interdisciplinary meeting aimed at updating and discussing the various cutting edge biomedical research areas of relevance to future paediatric oncology. Researchers from all over Europe and from overseas, many of whom have been cooperation partners for many years participated.
The meeting program highlighted the interfaces of paediatric cancer research with
- genome medicine
- developmental biology
- stem cell biology
- systems biology and systems immunology
- animal models
- drug development
- biomarker discovery and validation
- ethics
Modern biomedical research is moving from fragmented to holistic approaches to understand and manage complex diseases such as cancer. Paediatric oncology has always been at the forefront of research and treatment. Due to the rarity of individual childhood cancers, networking between all stakeholders (academia, industry, patients/parents, funding agencies, regulatory bodies and governments) across borders is necessary to enable basic and clinical research, access to and quality of treatment, and individualisation of therapy. Individualised therapy, however, requires a deep and comprehensive biological understanding of disease mechanisms, and depends on our ability to predict the response to targeted perturbations of the biological system "disease" on the cellular and organismal levels. This can be achieved by the close collaboration between wet lab researchers, bioinformaticians, modelers and mathematicians, and clinical researchers.
Read press release (in German)
