Alliance Investigators Meeting a Carolina Success

On October 16-18, 2007, the Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer held its second annual Investigators Meeting in Chapel Hill, NC. Hosted by the University of North Carolina, the meeting was structured to build on the efforts of last year's initial gathering in San Diego, CA, to further accelerate progress in using nanotechnology to develop novel diagnostic, imaging, and therapeutic tools for cancer. This year's meeting, attended by over 280 investigators, postdoctoral fellows, and students, featured eight scientific sessions, three plenary talks, a keynote presentation, and over 110 poster presentations. Representatives from all eight Centers of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (CCNEs) and the 12 Cancer Nanotechnology Platform Partnerships (CNPPs) attended.

Technical highlights of the meeting included reports on a host of new methods for creating biocompatible nanoparticles that can deliver large doses of one or more anticancer agents. Already, several of these novel delivery agents are in preclinical development, having demonstrated the ability to treat recalcitrant tumors, including those that have developed resistance to conventional antitumor drugs. Other studies highlighted the use of nanoparticles to treat both primary tumors and metastatic lesions.

Alliance investigators have been also developing new methods for targeting nanoparticles for both therapeutic and diagnostic applications. Many of these methods take a new approach to target discovery, using clever screening and amplification methods to find targeting agents that home in on molecules unique to cancer cells. Such methods not only provide novel targets for drug and imaging agent delivery but also can identify new cancer-specific processes for further study. The successful use of these target identification strategies represents an important step along the path to developing personalized therapies for cancer.

Early diagnosis and imaging of cancer were other areas of emphasis at the meeting, with Alliance investigators describing significant progress in developing clinically usable, diagnostic assay systems that use microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology to rapidly and inexpensively process and analyze blood and other biospecimens for early signs of cancer. In the same vein, Alliance investigators described new, highly sensitive, targeted imaging agents that have the potential to detect cancer and metastatic lesions far sooner than is possible today.

Another highlight of the meeting was a talk given by Alliance investigator and successful entrepreneur Mark Davis, Ph.D., of the California Institute of Technology and the Alliance-funded Nanosystems Biology Cancer Center, whose novel nanoparticulate delivery system has already yielded two drugs that are progressing through clinical trials. In his keynote address, Dr. Davis addressed many of the issues that Alliance investigators will face as they take their research advances into the clinic and offered advice, based on his experience, about how to anticipate key obstacles along the clinical development pathway and plan accordingly to avoid the most common pitfalls.

In addition to the technical presentations, the meeting featured tutorial sessions designed to bring researchers new to the field of cancer nanotechnology up to speed on topics outside of their normal areas of expertise. For those investigators coming from technology fields, tutorial session topics included the basic principles of histology and pathology, basic cancer biology, and animal models of cancer. Investigators with a background in oncology and cancer biology benefited from sessions on nanoparticle biodistribution and the materials science foundation of nanotechnology.

Click here for the detailed meeting report.