Generalinformation
Current status
of RAS research
One third of all human cancers – often associated to poor prognosis and low therapeutic responses – are driven by mutations of the RAS family of genes.
For this reason the successful inhibition of RAS activity has long been a biological challenge and a primary medical need.
After four decades of enormous but rather disappointing efforts to efficiently target RAS, we are now privileged to witness a paradigm shift in the clinical management of these cancers.
Recently, the first specific KRAS inhibitors (sotorasib and adagrasib) received approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Additional RAS inhibitors (both direct and indirect) are now at different stages of validation and hopefully will soon be available to complement the therapeutic repertoire against these oncogenes.
We thus believe that our 3-day international symposium entitled Targeting RAS: new avenues and challenges will be a timely and constructive event to discuss new advances in the field and new possible therapeutic options.
The primary goal is to assemble clinicians, preclinical and pharmaceutical scientists working on cancers driven by mutant RAS to develop ways to understand them and create effective, new therapies for RAS-related cancers in an open model of collaboration that may push the field forward.
We aim to have a relatively small audience (around 200 participants) to foster scientific interactions and discussions in all possible formats. At the same time, we plan to nurture a multidisciplinary scientific debate to envision how current research and an increasing panel of novel medicines may guide future clinical practice to tackle RAS-driven cancers.
The symposium will include invited presentations, short presentations from selected abstracts and poster sessions. The program features the latest and most exciting findings in RAS signalling in cancer. We will discuss research covering the role of RAS in tumour initiation & progression, crosstalk with the microenvironment as a way to sustain disease progression, RAS dynamics and structural insights, novel therapeutic approaches from the preclinical, clinical and pharmaceutical perspective and RAS systems biology. We expect to generate new ideas, collaborations and scientific strategies from diverse inputs.
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