104th American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting; Breakthroughs in science and technology changing cancer care

摘要

After an unusually cold March, this year's cherry blossom season came right in time for the 18 000 or more scientists attending the 104th American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting held in Washington, DC, April 6?10, 2013. This meeting is one of the biggest gatherings for cancer researchers worldwide. The organizing committee chaired by Jose Baselga from Harvard University and 16 cochairpersons, together with a 74-member Scientific Program Committee and over 60 subcommittees took on the herculean task to put together a program for the meeting. The meeting schedule included more than 100 educational, methods, and meet-theexpert sessions, more than 100 major and mini-symposia, and more than 5000 poster presentations spread throughout the four and a half days. The theme for the meeting, Personalizing Cancer Care Through Discovery Science, was chosen to acknowledge the accelerated pace of discoveries in basic, translational, and clinical cancer research. Next generation sequencing (NGS) as well as genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are important contributors to this new phase of personalized cancer care, therefore were major topics for several sessions at this meeting. In this short report, we will highlight a few of the talks given at the 104th AACR Annual Meeting, focusing on the NGS and GWAS subject areas.