Dear Participant:

On behalf of the National Cancer Institute's Clinical Proteomic Technologies for Cancer (CPTC), I welcome you to the CPTC Third Annual Meeting, October 5-7, 2009, in Bethesda, Maryland.

NCI's CPTC is a nationwide, interdisciplinary group of partnerships among a multitude of institutions and individuals working to establish and advance a more reliable and efficient biomarker development pipeline. CPTC’s investigators are achieving this goal by addressing and reducing the layers of variability at every step of the biomarker discovery and verification pipelines, from experimental design through data analysis.

As a result, CPTC is the leader in defining proteomic platform performance parameters and standards to define proteomic states that are anticipated to produce better credentialed candidate leads that will ultimately accelerate the discovery of new cancer biomarkers. CPTC’s work will have far-reaching impacts, including the ultimate goal of reducing the burden of suffering and death due to cancer.

CPTC has achieved a tremendous amount of progress, which is a reflection of deep commitment to teamwork and collaborative science focused on achieving common goals. This year’s meeting has been planned along major scientific themes that are being conducted in the program, and each session will showcase a panel of presentations reflecting a major proteomic discipline. In addition to presenting a significant amount of work produced by our teams and individual investigators who are helping to advance our understanding of protein biology in cancer and accelerate discovery research and clinical applications, this year’s meeting will highlight keynote talks, special plenary lectures from national and international experts in the field of proteomics research, public-private partnerships, and community-based resources such as the NCI’s Antibody Characterization Program, a component of CPTC.

The CPTC meeting will begin on Monday morning, October 5, 2009 and close by Wednesday noon, October 7, 2009. This year's event will be held in conjunction with NCI's Innovative Molecular Analysis Technologies (IMAT) program to foster greater collaboration among its investigators.

The IMAT meeting will kick off with a joint CPTC and IMAT session on the morning of Wednesday, October 7, 2009. The official IMAT meeting will begin on Wednesday afternoon.

I look forward to seeing you in Bethesda!

Sincerely,

Henry Rodriguez, Ph.D., M.B.A.
Director, Clinical Proteomics Technologies for Cancer