Chris Fmedsci0:11
We're in Whistler for the 2017 Cancer Immunotherapy and Immunology meeting. It's a very exciting meeting. There's over 600 colleagues attending. I think what is particularly exciting about this meeting is the large number of new data that have been presented, data that have not been shared, that's not published, has not been presented in any other abstract, but it's presented for the first time here at Keystone. It's particularly interesting to learn about the molecules that we all believe will be the next generation of potential targets for cancer immunotherapy, for example VISTA, LAG-3, TIM-3, ICOS, and also learning more about the molecular regulation of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis as well as CTLA-4. In 2018, I'm co-organizing the next immunotherapy meeting for Keystone. It is called Cancer Immunotherapy Combinations. I'm co-organizing it with Lieping Chen from Yale and with Lisa Coussens from Oregon University. We now know that checkpoint inhibitors have been established as a class, as a standard of care as single agents or in combination for certain cancers. But we also know that most patients with cancers do not respond to checkpoint inhibitors, and those that do respond will develop resistant disease. So I believe we're at the dawn of a new era. By 2025, most patients, not all patients, but most patients with cancer will be treated with an immunotherapy. So how are we going to integrate immunotherapies into standard of care cancer medicine? How are we going to integrate immunotherapy with radiotherapy, with cytotoxic therapies, chemotherapy, with antibody drug conjugates, with tyrosine kinase inhibitors? And which models should we use that's going to help us to predict rational combinations? What will be the correct scheduling and sequencing? What preclinical data can help us to inform us how to combine these molecules that is not all random, that is actually real rational combination? So that's the basis of that meeting. I think the meeting is going to be of interest to anyone that's interested in cancer biology, cancer research, cancer medicine, and cancer treatment. So the program is designed to cover basic cancer research and cancer immunology, as well as translational cancer immunology, as well as the latest insights into cancer therapy. So I really think the meeting is going to be of interest to anyone with an interest in cancer medicine, cancer biology, from researchers, academic researchers, industry researchers, as well as clinicians working in the clinic in oncology. The field is moving very, very rapidly, a lot of new information, new data being produced daily. So I suspect a year from now there'll be a lot of new molecular insights, there'll be a lot of new preclinical data, but most importantly also for this meeting, first insights into some of the novel combinations that have been tested in the clinic.
