This webinar, hosted by FCF in collaboration with TargetCancer Foundation and Angiosarcoma Awareness, is the second of four webinars in which we explore how precision cancer medicine is being applied to rare cancers.
A major mode of precision cancer medicine entails identification of all mutations in a patient’s tumor cells that are potentially associated with cancerous growth. A key goal is to develop targeted cancer therapies that attack specific molecular drivers of cancer, and to use these treatments specifically in those patients whose cancers are most likely to respond.
This particular webinar will explore the application of functional precision medicine to rare cancers, a strategy whereby live tumor cells from affected individuals are directly treated with drugs to provide immediate, personalized information to guide therapy. Increasingly, the clinical community has realized that more personalized approaches to therapy are often needed to provide additional information regarding tumor vulnerabilities and improve treatment outcomes.
Please join us as Mark Furth, Scientific Director of the Fibrolamellar Cancer Foundation, leads a group of distinguished panelists in a discussion of the question – “Can tumor profiling and personalized drug testing help patients with rare cancers?”
Panelists
- Taran Gujral, PhD:
Dr. Gujral is an Associate Professor in the Human Biology Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Seattle, WA. He describes himself as “a systems biologist who takes a big-picture, multidisciplinary approach to studies of cell-cell interactions…[and] investigates both tumor cells and their microenvironment.” Of particular interest to the webinar, his lab has developed novel laboratory methods and computational tools to evaluate pharmacological applications of targeted protein kinase inhibitors to treat cancer and other disease states.
- Robert Nagourney, MD:
Dr. Nagourney heads the Nagourney Cancer Institute of Long Beach, CA. (nagourneycancerinstitute.com). The Nagourney Institute, an accredited federal and state-licensed laboratory, analyzes live cancer cells from patients to “offer state-of-the-art personalized cancer testing that helps select the most effect and least toxic drug regimen for [a patient’s] cancer.” Dr. Nagourney was an early pioneer in the development of such personalized testing and applies it now to ultra-rare as well as more common cancers. - Eytan Ruppin, MD, PhD:
Dr. Ruppin is Chief of the Cancer Data Science Laboratory of the US National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD. He joined the NCI in January 2018. His areas of expertise include: big data analysis; machine learning; bioinformatics and computational biology; genome-scale metabolic modeling; genetic interactions in cancer; precision medicine; and immunotherapy. He is also a co-founder of startup companies in precision medicine and cancer drug discovery. - Praveen Sethupathy, PhD:
Dr. Sethupathy is Professor of Physiological Genomics and Director of the Center for Vertebrate Genomics in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. He takes a broad view of systems biology as applied to cancer and other diseases, with expertise in genomics and gene regulation, microRNAs, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics, the quantitative genetics of complex traits, and bioinformatics. He has become an important leader in research on fibrolamellar carcinoma, and has been awarded multiple grants from the FCF.
Recorded video
Click here to view a recording of the event!