Breast cancer is now the most common cancer diagnosis worldwide.   Most breast cancers are defined by and driven by the Estrogen Receptor (ER) transcriptional pathway and new insight into how ER mediates gene expression has identified novel therapeutic targets. Endocrine therapies that either disrupt transactivation of ER or reduce the amount of ER present intracellularly are the core treatment strategies for ER-positive breast cancers, but intrinsic and acquired resistance limits clinical efficacy.

Biological understanding of the different subtypes of breast cancer has revealed extraordinary insight into the heterogeneity within the disease, but it has also revealed fundamental processes associated with disease progression and treatment response. These recent advances in our understanding of breast cancer subtypes have resulted in tailored treatment for specific patient subpopulations and improved overall survival rates.

The development of newer treatments that target the ER pathway (i.e. CDK4/6 inhibitors that target a downstream target gene of the ER pathway) have changed breast cancer treatment. Recent analysis of cross-talk between ER and related nuclear receptor transcription factors, such as Androgen Receptor (AR), Progesterone Receptor (PR) and Glucocorticoid Receptor (GR) has identified novel therapeutic opportunities for blocking ER activity via activation of parallel, competing nuclear receptor pathways.

More recent developments in HER2-targeted agents for the treatment of HER2+ tumors have made substantial improvements to treatment responses for patients with HER2+ disease. Our understanding of Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) has generally lagged behind our understanding of other subtypes, but important recent new insight into the genetic perturbations and the associations with specific treatment responses have shed light on this subtype of the disease.

Transcriptomic and genetic studies have revolutionized our understanding of breast cancer and led to the development of new diagnostics and therapeutic strategies. More recent advances in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and spatial imaging technologies have revolutionized our understanding of breast cancers and provided insight into complex cellular ecosystems that continuously interact with each other to govern tumor progression and treatment outcome.  New computational approaches have enabled the development of spatial maps of breast cancers at single-cell resolution, including immune cell populations and their interactions with stromal and tumor cells, providing unique biological and mechanistic insights into the tumour microenvironment and its role in disease progression, treatment-response and treatment-resistance.

This meeting will involve leaders in the field who study the biological basis of breast cancer, develop approaches for patient stratification, run clinical trials or develop new medicines for patients with breast cancer.

Key Sessions

• New molecular insight into breast cancer
• Contemporary models of breast cancer
• Spatial relationships between molecules and cell types
• What are the molecular events that drive metastasis
• Harnessing the immune system
• How do we position new treatments in the therapeutic spectrum

Confirmed Speakers

Cheryl Arrowsmith (University of Toronto)
Christine Chaffer (Garvan Institute)
Sarat Chandarlapaty (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center)
Christina Curtis (Stanford Medicine)
Melissa Davis (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research)
Geoffrey Greene (University of Chicago)
Theresa Hickey (University of Adelaide)
Katherine Hoadley (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Walid Khaled (University of Cambridge)
Simon Knott (Cedars-Sinai)
Weibo Luo (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center)
Mathieu Lupien (University Health Network)
Luca Magnani (Imperial College London)
Ciara Metcalfe (Genentech)
Bill Muller (McGill University)
Senthil Muthuswamy (Dana-Farber / Harvard Cancer Center)
Neal Rosen (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center)
Carol Sartorius (University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus)
Elinor Sawyers (King’s College London)
Rachel Schiff (Baylor College of Medicine)
Violeta Serra (Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology)
Alex Swabrick (Garvan Institute)
Céline Vallot (Institut Curie)
Valerie Weaver (University of California, San Francisco)
Leonie Young (Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland)
Wilbert Zwart (Netherlands Cancer Institute)

Student Offer

Take advantage of this fantastic opportunity for students and postdocs! Fully paying academics can bring a student for only $990. Both registration packages include; accommodation for the 01, 02, 03 May 2023 (on a shared basis for students/postdocs) and an all-inclusive food and beverage package for the conference period. Once registered, please contact Laura Trundle to obtain a special registration link for your student.

Target Audience

The audience will be a mixture of basic biologists, pre-clinical scientists, clinicians (including Oncologists, Pathologists, Surgeons), computational experts and representatives from Biotech and Pharma. While the audience will be composed of the world leaders in these fields, it will also be heavily focused towards trainees. We aim to attract excellent PhD students and postdocs from around the globe to expose them to the leaders in the field. As is typically the case for IABCR meetings, the audience will be composed of people from around the world, including North America, Europe and Australasia. We are particularly keen to bolster our attendance from regions that are typically under-represented, including South America and Asia and we will ensure that we invite a number of speakers from these regions. This will be facilitated financially (where possible) by travel awards for trainees from these specific regions to encourage attendance.

Education Need

New biological insight into the different breast cancer subtypes has revealed critical new information into ways of improving patient stratification (i.e. who should not receive specific treatments and who will likely benefit from those treatments), but the translation of these findings into better patient care requires collaborative efforts between basic biologists and clinicians. The IABCR meeting constitutes one of the premier meetings that brings together leading biologists and clinicians and the outcome of this is the sharing of knowledge that will steer pre-clinical work, based on the basic biological findings from attendees, as well as the initiation of clinical trials based on pre-clinical work presented at this meeting.

The ability to study breast cancer subtypes has been limited by the paucity of preclinical models representative of contemporary disease states (particularly for ER+ disease), the lack of robust genetic models and the fact that in vivo models to study breast cancer metastasis have been rudimentary and not physiologically relevant. These issues have been addressed by the community in recent years, with the advent of stable, well characterised PDX models of different subtypes, the implementation of organoid systems and the development and optimisation of the intraductal (MIND) model for studying breast cancer metastasis. These models and systems have been developed within specific labs, but for maximum exploitation and exposure of these new systems, the IABCR meeting is essential, since it will bring together key people developing the models, with researchers and doctors who can utilise them to address the most clinically relevant questions. The audience will learn about the value and utility of new in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo platforms, they will have the opportunity to discuss the nuances and technical specifics of these methods with the labs who have developed them, they will be exposed to new insight into molecular cross-talk and learn about the potential for single cell and spatial technologies to provide new insight into breast cancer progression and treatment response. The meeting will foster new collaborations between labs developing new models, labs with new technologies, and scientists and clinicians to develop new preclinical studies to address key biological questions and design clinical trials to better treat patients and improve survival of women with breast cancer.

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