Science for Society - Precision medicine in cancer therapy

Charles Swanton and Alberto Bardelli will discuss cancer progression as an evolutionary process and explore how this way of looking at cancer may lead to more effective strategies for managing and treating it. The speakers will compare cancer evolution to organismal evolution, including viruses and describe how ecological theories and mathematical models are being used to understand the complex dynamics between a tumor and its microenvironment during cancer progression. Finally, they will discuss improved methods to monitor tumor evolution (e.g., liquid biopsies) and the development of more effective strategies for managing and treating cancers (e.g., immunotherapies).

Speakers

CHARLES SWANTON completed his MD PhD training in 1999 at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories and Cancer Research UK clinician scientist/medical oncology training in 2008. Charles combines his laboratory research at the Francis Crick Institute with clinical duties at UCLH and as director of the CRUK UCL Lung Cancer Centre, focussed on how tumours evolve over space and time. Charles has helped to define the branched evolutionary histories of solid tumours, processes that drive cancer cell-to-cell variation in the form of new cancer mutations or chromosomal instabilities, and the impact of such cancer diversity on effective immune surveillance and clinical outcome. Charles was made Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in April 2011, appointed Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015, Napier Professor in Cancer by the Royal Society in 2016, appointed Cancer Research UK’s Chief Clinician in 2017, and elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018. Charles was awarded the Stand up to Cancer Translational Cancer Research Prize (2015), Glaxo Smithkline Biochemical Society Prize (2016), San Salvatore prize for Cancer Research (2017), the Ellison-Cliffe Medal, Royal Society of Medicine (2017), recipient of the Gordon Hamilton Fairley Medal (2018), the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Centre Kraft Prize for Excellence in Cancer Research (2018), the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) Paul A. Bunn Scientific Award for achievements in lung cancer (2018), and ESMO Award for Translational Research in 2019. He is the author of over 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts (H index of 75).

ALBERTO BARDELLI is Full Professor at Dept. of Oncology, University of Torino, Director of the Laboratory of Molecular Oncology at Candiolo Cancer Institute IRCCS and President of the EACR-European Association for Cancer Research. His work is aimed at developing precision medicines for cancer patients. As a postdoc at the Johns Hopkins University (USA), in the group led by Bert Vogelstein, he performed the first comprehensive mutational profile of kinases in colorectal cancers (CRC). As an independent investigator, he has then translated these findings into clinical practice by discovering the molecular landscape of response and resistance to EGFR, HER2 and NTRK1 blockade in CRC. These findings have found clinical applicability and were translated in blood-based tests (liquid biopsies). A future focus of his lab is to study how the emergence and evolution of drug-resistant clones can be restrained to improve the efficacy of anticancer agents, that is to develop therapies that adapt to tumor’s evolution. In 2014 Prof Bardelli has been listed in the Thomson Reuters List of Highly Cited Researchers. In 2016 won the Grant for Oncology Innovation Research Project and in 2017 has been recognized with the ESMO Translational Research Award. He is the author of over 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts (Scopus H factor 76).