Emerging Strategies to Overcome Heterogeneous Resistance Mechanisms

This fact has motivated intense efforts in recent years to define the mechanisms of resistance to commonly used anticancer drugs based on the hope that by doing so, it will be possible to design new therapies that block these mechanisms and thereby circumvent resistance. Unfortunately, we now know that many diverse resistance mechanisms can exist for each drug, and these mechanisms often co-occur within individual patients. As a result, efforts to improve therapeutic responses by blocking .. continue reading individual resistance mechanisms have largely failed, while efforts to block combinations of resistance mechanisms have been limited by toxicities. In light of this challenge, emerging studies in the field are seeking to identify creative and fundamentally new strategies to circumvent resistance. These strategies include identifying common downstream signaling nodes shared by many or all major resistance mechanisms; profiling resistant cells to identify “collateral sensitivities” – vulnerabilities caused by evolutionary trade-offs made by cancer cells along the path to resistance; defining drug combinations with non-overlapping resistance landscapes, and exploring the possibility of individually targeting discrete subclones. The abstracts should be only one or two paragraphs outlining the theme of your presentation and should reflect the objective and spirit of the meeting (see above). Abstracts will be circulated about one week before the meeting.