This webinar is the final webinar in which we explore how precision cancer medicine is being applied to rare cancers.
Precision medicine looks at the genetic and molecular characteristics of a patient’s unique tumor to identify the tumor’s specific weaknesses. Once that level of identification is possible, custom-selected treatments that attack those specific vulnerabilities have great potential to improve patient 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 science and challenges behind the development of different types of targeted therapy and immunotherapy. Key topics and issues to be explored in this webinar include:
- Current landscape & challenges
- Targeted drugs for “challenging” targets
- Protein kinases
- Transcription factors
- Fusion proteins
- Advanced drug discovery
- Structure-based drug design
- Monoclonal antibodies & antibody-drug conjugates
- Inhibitory RNAs
- Protein degraders
- Gene targeting
- Immune therapies
- Vaccines
- Cell therapy
Panelists:
- Nabeel Bardeesy, PhD – Dr. Bardeesy received his PhD in Biochemistry from McGill University and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University. Dr. Bardeesy has led his own laboratory at the MGH Cancer Center since 2005. His research concentrates on liver, biliary, and pancreatic cancers. Dr. Bardeesy is a leading expert in cancers driven by alterations in protein kinase A (PKA) signaling pathways. His laboratory develops mouse and human models of cancers and utilizes them to develop targeted therapies tailored to tumors’ genetic makeup.
- Razelle Kurzrock, MD – Dr. Kurzrock has extensive experience in personalized cancer therapy and innovative clinical trials. She has published almost 900 peer-reviewed articles in elite medical journals, and she has been the Principal Investigator (PI) of numerous grants and funding awards totaling over $100 million. Dr. Kurzrock has a special passion to study and treat Rare Cancers. She founded a Rare Tumor Clinic at UCSD, heads the Early Therapeutics and Rare Cancers Committee for the NCI cooperative group SWOG, and has founded a Precision Medicine and Rare Cancers Clinic at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW).
- John Scott, PhD – Dr. Scott is the Edwin G. Krebs – Speights Professor of Cell Signaling and Cancer Biology and the Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He is a member of the Medical and Scientific Advisory Board of the Fibrolamellar Cancer Foundation. Dr. Scott has done pioneering research on understanding cellular signaling and the discovery of drugs that modulate that signalling since his postdoctoral studies with Nobel laureate Edwin Krebs. He has deep expertise in the regulation of protein kinases and phosphatases, enzymes that are central to the control of cellular metabolism and division. Much of his work focuses on the organization of intracellular “signaling islands” that ensure the efficient and accurate response of cells to environmental cues and how that organization is changed within cancerous cells.
Video of the event:
Please visit FCF’s YouTube channel to view a recording of the event.