The Global Cancer Conference (GCC) has kick started in Hyderabad. The three-day conference from 15 to17 September is being held at Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC) is focussing on the challenges of cancer treatment and understanding the biological process of the disease for prevention, diagnosis and evolving new treatment procedures.
According to. Srinivas Rao, a scientist at Nektar Therapeutics, Hyderabad, “Cancer disease has many manifestations, even today, it is really tough to understand clearly, where and when it caused and what is the reason of the cause. In spite of having lot of research done on the disease, we are not able to completely cure it if found in the late stage. Therefore, it is important for the world doctor and pharma fraternity to debate and discusses on many more such platforms and that help us to bring out new drugs and treatment procedures to cure the dreaded disease.”
The GCC is attended by 1000 delegates from across 20 countries around the globe. Eminent personalities like Dr. Kakarla Subba Rao, former director of NIMS, Shikha Bose from School of Medicine of University of California and Shymal Desai, associate professor of Biochemistry and molecular biology at Neuroscience Center of Excellence, LSU Medical School, New Orleans, Shinya Kimura, director of Cancer Centre of Saga University Hospital from Japan, Porunellor A Mathew from University of North Texas Health Science Center, are some of the leading speakers who took part in the conference.
The International Cancer Conference also deliberated on recent advances in cancer diagnosis and therapy. “Cancer is not a single disease, specific biological processes and distinct gene pathways are associated with prognosis of the disease and its sensitivity to chemotherapy, radiotherapy and targeted agents in different subtypes of cancers. A primary challenge for future treatment of patients with cancer will be to distinguish genes and pathways that drive cancer proliferation from genes and pathways that have no primary role in the development of cancer,” said Kakarla Subba Rao while giving a presentation on cancer prognosis.
According to experts, the identification of functional pathways that are enriched for mutated genes will select sub-population of patients that will most likely be sensitive to chemotherapy or to biology driven targeted agents, this might help the doctors personalise treatment according to specific subtypes of cancer, in order to maximise efficacy while minimizing the extent of treatment. The detailed understanding of the above said biological process will open new gates for cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment regimes.
One of the most important factors in the survival of cancer patients is detection at an early stage. Clinical assays that detect the early events of cancer offer an opportunity to intervene and prevent cancer progression. Biomarkers are important molecular signatures of the phenotype of a cell that aid in early cancer detection and risk assessment.
“Although new information and technologies are clearly important for new biomarker discovery, we face major hurdles in translating new findings into clinical application,” added another scientist at the conference.
On the whole the GCC has become an apt platform for the global leaders to learn, share and discuss examples of recent advances and limitations in cancer biomarker identification and validation, and the implications for cancer prevention.