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From the promise of precision medicine to the development of a powerful new computational tool that could dramatically improve drug discovery, more than 70 bench scientists, oncologists and computational biologists from Weill Cornell Medical College will present their work at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).

As noted by AACR 2015 program director and Meyer Cancer Center director Lewis Cantley, precision medicine, immunotherapy, and innovative, science-driven clinical trials will be the hot topics at the conference, which is set to bring 23,000 cancer researchers to Philadelphia on April 18-22. Weill Cornell expertise in each of these fields will be showcased:

• Mark Rubin and colleagues will share case studies from the inaugural two years of Weill Cornell’s Institute of Precision Medicine. These include some inspiring success stories, as well as obstacles the team had to overcome.
• Renowned immunotherapy expert Douglas Fearon will lead an educational session and major symposium on the tumor microenvironment, and innate and adaptive immunity in cancer.
• Selina Chen-Kiang will reveal exciting results from clinical trials involving combination therapy to inhibit cyclin-dependent kinases (CDK4/6) in mantle cell lymphoma and multiple myeloma patients.

Increasing evidence points to obesity as a major avoidable risk factor for cancer – Andrew Dannenberg, the first to link obesity with breast inflammation and the progression of breast cancer, will lead a minisymposium on cancer prevention and speak at a major symposium on intervention strategies for breaking the obesity-cancer link.

Computational biologist Olivier Elemento will reveal a new tool that harnesses the power of several cancer data sets to identify the mechanisms of molecular targets and predict promising new avenues of drug discovery.

Basic scientists will also share their discoveries into the fundamental mechanisms of cancer.

• Lewis Cantley will deliver the Ninth Annual AACR Princess Takamatsu Memorial Lectureship on Targeting PI3K for Cancer Therapy.
• In a meet-the-expert session, John Blenis will discuss how the mTOR signaling pathway effects cellular metabolism and could provide important therapeutic opportunities.
• Laurie Glimcher, the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, will discuss her research into the genesis and progression of aggressive triple-negative breast cancer.
• Paraskevi Giannakakou will present work on microtubules that sheds light on taxane resistance, with important impacts for those receiving some of the most commonly used chemotherapy treatments.
• Vivek Mittal will discuss his discovery of complex communication networks between tumors and their microenvironment.
• Dimple Chakravarty will talk about her revelation into the link between breast and prostate cancer and its potential impact on new prognostic biomarkers and treatments.