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What's new at the STARR Cancer Consortium Annual Retreat

Here is some background knowledge about the retreat I went to this Monday& Tuesday. The Starr Cancer Consortium (SCC) was established in 2006 through a generous gift from The Starr Foundation to advance research in new ways that will have an impact on the understanding, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of cancer. Basically the retreat is like an annual summary of cancer discovery presented by the funded dream team- The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University, and Weill Cornell Medical College. As we can imagine, there were full of exciting findings, many of which were achieved by teamwork among the top institutes.

Lots of efforts were made on functional genomics (we now don't start with one oncogene/tumor suppressor gene, we lay out the whole genome profiling of the patients.). Remember the big news about movie star Angelina Jolie who received a surgery to remove both of her breasts to prevent breast cancer? The fact is not that simple as "she has mutations on the breast cancer-related oncogene BRCA1, so she had her breast removed to bring down the risk of her getting breast cancer." In fact, different mutations on the gene render different clinical prediction on breast cancer, which has been worked out by clinical researchers from MSKCC and the Broad Institute. Now they are trying to incorporate the data into a clinical protocol so that patients later on can have a well-calculated risk of getting breast cancer. Any preventative surgery will only be done based on the analysis.

We are not only caring about the mutations that tumor cells carry, more concepts are being invented as Secretome, microtome, etc. Scientists are getting more and more interested in the microenvironment of tumor cells- the effect of gut microbiota on tumorgenesis, the mutual sustenance of tumor cells and stromal cells, and the anti-tumor effect of immune cells. The picture of cancer is far more complicated than the crazy proliferation of tumor cells. For example, the PD-1 inhibitor (commercialized as Pembrolizumab) had very good effect on treating melanoma and a type of lung cancer. However, the drug doesn't work for some melanoma and lung cancer patients. The different response of patients are being studied by different groups from different aspects. Researchers from MSKCC found that the response is correlated with the mutation burden of the patient. Namely, the more mutations that a patient carry, the higher chance that he/she will have the tumor-specific antigen that could be recognized by immune cells, the higher chance the drug could work.


Other interesting presentations include in vitro 3D culture of patient sample that could be used to test drug efficiency, single-cell RNA sequencing that helps to address the heterogeneity of individual cancer cells, the mutations on histone protein (protein that binds to DNA) that causing cancer, etc. The cancer research is contributed by so many talented researchers and clinicians that the new findings are made every second!

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