1st Young Scientist Cancer Congress (YS2C)

New research strategies for cancer therapy – from bench to bedside

October 05, 2023 – Toulouse France

The CRCT postdocs association was created in 2022 by Benoît Aliaga, Chloé Bessière and Steffen Fuchs. It gathers the 31 postdocs who are currently present in our research center. We decided to organize the 1st Young Scientist Cancer Congress of the Cancéropôle Grand Sud Ouest (GSO) on the 5th October 2023 at the Oncopole, Toulouse.

Aim: The main goals of this day are to promote the work of the GSO postdocs and young clinician scientists, to network, and to optimize their career paths.
Public: To achieve our goals, we decided to open the conference to the whole scientific community of the GSO, which are researchers and clinicians of all career levels.
Organization: This day will alternate presentations by internationally renowned keynote speakers, presentations by postdocs from the GSO, an application-focused presentation by a leading single-cell sequencing company and a presentation from an editor of Nature Communications about scientific publishing and peer-reviewing.

Invited keynote speakers

  • Francesco Iorio (Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge / Human Technopole, Milan, Italy)
  • Olivier Delattre (Institut Curie, Paris, France)
  • Manel Esteller (Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute, Barcelona, Spain)
  • Kathryn McGinnis, Associate Editor (Nature Communications, London, UK)

Call for abstracts of young scientists ONLY :

We invite all postdocs and young clinicians to submit abstracts for an oral presentation. Further, we invite PhD students, together with postdocs and young clinicians, to present a poster. A selection committee of GSO postdocs/young clinicians will select the best abstracts for oral presentations and posters.

When tweeting about the conference, please use our hashtag #YS2C_GSO

Key dates and registration :

  • Deadline for submission of abstracts for oral presentations: July 13, 2023 (23:59)
  • Deadline for submission of abstracts for poster presentations: September 08, 2023 (23:59)
  • Registration (obligatory) until: September 08, 2023 (23:59)

Registration is obligatory, but free for all researchers. Please follow the instructions on the GSO web portal

The physician’s corner – a dedicated space for informal meetings between clinicians and researchers

One of our aims is to bring young clinicians and researchers together. This will foster exchange and potentially start future collaborations, all for the sake of translational research and ultimately for the patients’ benefit. This is why we will have a dedicated space during the lunch break and poster session, “the physician’s corner”, where informal discussions between clinicians and researchers can happen in a relaxed atmosphere. Use this opportunity and just come around!

Preliminary program

New research strategies for cancer therapy – from bench to bedside

8:30 Registration + Welcome coffee
9:00 Welcome address

Session 1: Cancer dependencies and drug development

9:15-10:00 Keynote 1: Francesco Iorio, Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK; Human Technopole, Milano, Italy
Optimisation and drug-discovery oriented analyses of CRISPR-Cas9 screens.

10:00-10:30 Coffee break

10:30-10:50 Selected presentation 1

10:50-11:10 Selected presentation 2

Session 2: Single-cell technologies and their applications to dissect cancer heterogeneity 

11:10-11:30 Selected presentation 3

11:30-11:50 Tech Talk by Mission Bio (S. Formisano, S. Colinet) about current single-cell applications

11:50-14:15 Poster session, company desks (present during the whole day), lunch buffet and Physician’s corner

Session 3: Cancer plasticity and heterogeneity 

14:15-15:00 Keynote 2: Olivier Delattre, Institute Curie, Paris, France
Ewing sarcoma, a paradigm for cell reprogramming in cancer

15:00-15:20 Selected presentation 4

15:20-15:40 Selected presentation 5

15:40-16:10 The editor’s perspective: Kathryn McGinnis, Associate Editor, Nature Communications

16:10-16:40 Coffee break

Session 4: Cancer epigenomics and beyond

16:40-17:00 Selected presentation 6

17:00-17:45 Keynote 3: Manel Esteller, Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC), Barcelona, Spain
Cancer Epigenomics and Epitranscriptomics with a Single-Cell Twist.

17:45-18:00 Closing remarks and poster and oral communication awards ceremony.

Get-together/Icebreaker with the keynote speakers and the postdocs (at CRCT)

Speakers
Professor Manel Esteller, M.D., Ph.D.
Director, Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute

Manel Esteller graduated in Medicine from the Universidad de Barcelona in 1992, where he also obtained his Ph.D. degree specialising in molecular genetics of endometrial carcinoma, in 1996. He was an Invited Researcher at the School of Biological and Medical Sciences at the University of St. Andrews, (Scotland, UK) during which time his research interests focused on the molecular genetics of inherited breast cancer. From 1997 to 2001, Esteller was a Postdoctoral Fellow and a Research Associate at the Johns Hopkins University and School of Medicine, (Baltimore, USA) where he studied DNA methylation and human cancer. His work was decisive in establishing promoter hypermethylation of tumour suppressor genes as a common hallmark of all human tumours.

From October 2001 to September 2008 Manel Esteller was the Leader of the CNIO Cancer Epigenetics Laboratory, where his principal area of research were the alterations in DNA methylation, histone modifications and chromatin in human cancer. Dr Esteller was the Director of the Cancer Epigenetics and Biology Program (PEBC) in Barcelona (2008-2019). He is the Director of the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC), Chairman of Genetics in the School of Medicine of the University of Barcelona, and an ICREA Research Professor.  His current research is devoted to the establishment of the epigenome and epitranscriptome maps of normal and transformed cells, and the development of new epigenetic drugs for cancer therapy.

Author of more than 600 original publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, 24 of them categorized as “Highly Cited Paper”. Dr Esteller has the highest total impact factor and the highest number of citations (81,783) among biomedical scientists in Spain. He has an h-Index of 134 by Web of Science – Clarivate Analytics and a h-Index of 166 according to Google Scholar. Dr. Esteller is considered among the Top 0.01% of World Scientists based on Impact by both the Stanford University (METRICS) and the Web of Science Group-Clarivate Analytics. He is also a Member of numerous international scientific societies, Editorial Boards and reviewer for many journals and funding agencies. Dr Esteller is also Associate Editor for Cancer Research, The Lancet Oncology, Carcinogenesis, Genome Research and The Journal of The National Cancer Institute. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Epigenetics. He is also the director of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project for Cancer of Unknown Primary (CUP) (2018-2022) of the National Cancer Institute – National Institutes of Health (NCI-NIH) in the United States (US) and the director of The International Proteogenome Consortium (ICPC) Project “Proteogenomics of B-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia” (2022-2023) also by the NCI.

His work has received, among other recognitions, the Carcinogenesis Award (2005), Beckman-Coulter Award (2006), Fondazione Piemontese per la Ricerca sul Cancro (FPRC) Award (2006), Swiss Bridge Award (2006), Innovation Award from the Commonwealth of Massachussets (2007), Human Frontier Science Program Award (2007), DEbiopharm-EPFL Award (2009), Dr. Josef Steiner Cancer Research Award (2009), Lilly Foundation Preclinical Biomedical Research Award (2009), World Health Summit Award (2010), European Research Council Advanced Grant (2011), “Rey Jaime I” Research Award (2013), Severo Ochoa Award in Biomedicine (2014),  National Award in Oncology (2014), “Dr Josep Trueta Medal”, Catalan Goverment (2015), National Research Award of the Catalan Goverment (2015), Gold Medal, Parlament of Catalonia (2016), International Award of Catalonia (2016), Falcó Carlemany Award (2017), Innovation in Healthcare Oncology Award (2018), Lansdowne Lecture Award, University of Victoria, Canada (2019), Narcís Monturiol Medal, Catalan Government (2020), Elected Member of the Academia Europaea (2021) and the European Academy of Sciences (2021). In 2022, his discovery of cancer type-specific DNA hypermethylation profiles was selected as a Landmark Article in Cancer Research by the AACR and the National Cancer Act.

Doctor Olivier Delattre  MD, Ph.D (information will follow)
Director at Cancer, Hétérogénéité, Instabilité et Plasticité – U830 – Institut Curie

Doctor Francesco Iorio Ph.D
Research Group Leader at Iorio Group, Computational Biology Research Centre, Human Technopole, Milan

Francesco Iorio is a Research Group leader in the Computational Biology Research Centre of Human Technopole (the life science institute in Milan, Italy). His group works at the interface of biology, machine learning, statistics and information theory to understand and predict how genomic alterations and molecular traits from other omics contribute to pathological processes, biological circuits’ rewiring and impact therapeutic responses in human cancers and other diseases.
Their research aims to advance human health by designing algorithms, computational tools and novel analytical methods for integrating and analyzing pharmacogenomics and functional-genomics datasets to identify new therapeutic targets, biomarkers and drug repositioning opportunities.

The Iorio Group is contributing to creating a comprehensive map of all the genetic dependencies in human cancers and developing a computational infrastructure for translating this map into guidelines for early-stage drug development and precision medicine.
They design, implement and maintain bioinformatics methods and original tools for the assessment of cancer pre-clinical models, the pre-processing, analysis and visualization of genome-editing screening data for the in-silico correction of new-technology-specific biases in such data, and the optimisation of single guide RNA libraries for pooled CRISPR-Cas9 screens and other experimental settings.
They are also interested in big-data analytics, developing biomedical predictive models based on non-biomedical data, and computationally efficient constrained randomisation strategies for testing combinatorial properties in large-scale genomic datasets and networks.

Doctor Kathryn McGinnis, Ph.D
Associate Editor, Nature Communications

Kathryn joined Nature Communications as an Associate Editor in 2021. She studied the role of steroids in brain cancer using bulk and single cell RNA-sequencing during her PhD and subsequent post-doc at the University of Leeds, UK. She previously received her BSc in Immunology at the University of Glasgow, and MSc working in industry within stem cell banking. Kathryn handles manuscripts surrounding the use of -omics technologies in cancer, particularly in the field of biomarkers of treatment response.

 

Stephane Mission Bio (information will follow)
Organizers

Organizer team:

Benoît Aliaga, Ph.D;
CRCT Toulouse

Chloé Bessiere, Ph.D;
CRCT Toulouse

Steffen Fuchs, MD;
CRCT Toulouse, Charité-University Hospital Berlin, Germany

Julie Ripoll, Ph.D;
LIRMM, Montpellier

Pierre-François Roux, Ph.D;
IRCM, Montpellier
Benjamin Bonnard, Ph.D;
BRIC, Bordeaux
Sara Ovejero, Ph.D;
IGH, Montpellier

Pratical informations

Location :

The conference will take place at the IUCT (Institut Universitaire du Cancer de Toulouse, https://www.iuct-oncopole.fr/en/) amphitheater. The poster session and the lunch buffet will take place in proximity to the amphitheater. The apéro/icebreaker after the conference, will take place at the CRCT, first floor, which is directly accessible from the IUCT.

How access to IUCToncopole

 

 

Sponsors and Partners

Centre de Recherches en Cancérologie de Toulouse

Centre de Recherches en Cancérologie de Toulouse (Oncopole)

2, avenue Hubert Curien
31037 - Toulouse - FR

Nous contacter

05 82 74 15 75

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