BREAST-PREDICT are regularly advised by our independent scientific advisory board (SAB) which has previously included seven leading international scientists in the oncology field: Dr. Garrett Hampton, Genentech, U.S.A.; Prof. Richard Kennedy, Queen’s University Belfast, U.K.; Prof. Ursula Klingmüller, Heidelberg, Germany; Prof. Robert Clarke, Georgetown University, U.S.A.; Dr. Jason Carroll, Cambridge Research Institute, U.K.; Prof. Mats Lambe, Karolinska Institute, Sweden; and Prof. Liam Murray, Queen’s University Belfast, U.K.
This year the BREAST-PREDICT team decided that our programme would greatly benefit from new additional members with different areas of expertise. Therefore, we invited four new members to join our SAB in Year 3 (in addition to the original seven): Prof. Robert Coleman, a medical oncologist at the University of Sheffield who will bring his expertise in clinical cancer research; Prof. Anne-Lise Børresen-Dale, University of Oslo who has expertise with expression profiling of breast carcinomas; Prof. Klaus Pantel, at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf whose research focuses on liquid biopsies and circulating tumour DNA; and Dr. Pernette J. Verschure at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, Amsterdam with expertise in the area of epigenomics in breast cancer.
Excitingly, on 19th October 2016 we hosted a public research showcase in the UCD Conway Institute to mark the 3rd annual Cancer Week Ireland and invited three of our new SAB members to present at this event. Prof. Coleman kicked of the symposium with a highly engaging keynote lecture on the bone microenvironment in breast cancer; this was followed by Prof. Børresen-Dale who presented on gauging inter- and intra-tumor heterogeneity in breast cancer; and finally, Dr. Verschure discussed the epigenetics research ongoing in her group.
The following day, we held our third annual SAB meeting with approximately 45 researchers and 5 SAB members in attendance (including the 3 new members). This was an excellent meeting, and included talks from 14 team members, 14 posters, and 5 moderated posters. The SAB are very satisfied with our progress to date, and gave us very useful feedback to help plan for the remaining success of BREAST-PREDICT during the final two years of our research programme.