Three-Day Program to Feature Special Session and Interdisciplinary Roundtable Discussion on Academia-Industry Interface in New Drug Discovery and Development
Newswise — New York, NY, Mar. 9, 2011 – The Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium (CIC), a program of the nonprofit Cancer Research Institute, will host its 2011 Scientific Colloquium March 17-19, 2011, at the Gaylord National Hotel and Convention Center in National Harbor, MD. This year’s meeting, titled “Schedule and Dose for Combination Therapy,” will include a series of plenary lectures from academic and industry leaders in tumor immunology and immunotherapy. The meeting will also feature a special session and roundtable discussion on the academia-industry interface within the emerging field of immuno-oncology, with the goal of clearly defining—and outlining possible solutions to—the key challenges as viewed from the perspectives of stakeholders within the academic, industrial, nonprofit, and regulatory sectors.
Over the past year, two important clinical successes have stood out within the field of tumor immunotherapy: the FDA approval in April 2010 of sipuleucel-T (Provenge®), the therapeutic vaccine for prostate cancer; and demonstration in June 2010 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology that the anti-CTLA-4 monoclonal antibody ipilimumab (Yervoy™) is the first treatment ever shown to extend the lives of patients with advanced melanoma. As these and other treatments that target the immune system enter the clinic, it will be necessary for oncologists to understand how to combine them with existing standards of care such as chemotherapy and radiation, as well as with other experimental agents, to achieve the best outcomes for patients. Determining the optimal schedule and dose for each combination, however, is critical to ongoing success in the field and will require close investigation and collaboration among a broad array of stakeholders. To date, the field has not undertaken a systematic effort to determine the parameters for collaborative clinical drug development of combination therapies that include cancer immunotherapies.
The 2011 Scientific Colloquium of the Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium will bring together key stakeholders to address this challenge, share the most current data on the administration of combination approaches, and work to identify lessons that can help guide future combination therapy studies.
Rafi Ahmed, Ph,.D., the Georgia Research Alliance Scholar in Vaccine Research and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Emory University, will give the keynote presentation, “Impact of dose and schedule on effector and memory T cell generation,” during the morning plenary session on March 17. On March 18, Mark M. Davis, Director of the Stanford Institute for Immunity, Transplantation, and Infection at Stanford University School of Medicine, will give the keynote address titled, “The Human Immunology Project: Understanding the role of the immune system in health and disease.”
Other topics include:
• Studying Vaccination Schedules: Lessons from Infectious Disease• Schedule and Dose: Relevance for Combination Therapy• Immune Therapy Combined with Other Immune Therapy, Chemotherapy, Targeted Therapies, or Local Therapies• Academia-Industry Interface: Crosstalk to Shape the Future of Immuno-Oncology• Treg (Regulatory T cell) Homeostasis• Immunological Monitoring
Speakers and panel discussion participants include:
• Rafi Ahmed, Emory University, Atlanta, GA• Charlotte Ariyan, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY• Michael D. Becker, MD Becker Partners LLC, Newtown, PA• Margaret Callahan, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY• Stephen Creekmore, National Cancer Institute-Frederick, Frederick, MD• Tania Crombet Ramos, Centre of Molecular Immunology, Havana, Cuba• Jean-Marie Cuillerot, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Westport, CT• Leisha Emens, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD• Tito Fojo, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD• Silvia C. Formenti, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY• Mark Frohlich, Dendreon Corporation, Seattle, WA• Jeffrey Gelfand, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA• Gisela González Marinello, Centre of Molecular Immunology, Havana, Cuba• James L. Gulley, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD• Stephen Hodi, Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer, Milwaukee, WI• Axel Hoos, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Westport, CT• Christoph Huber, Association for Cancer Immunotherapy, Mainz, Germany• Adam Kolom, CRI Cancer Vaccine Acceleration Fund, New York, NY• Hyam Levitsky, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD• Ron Levy, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA• Yves Levy, University of Paris Etc, Publique-Hopitaus de Paris, French National Agency for Research on AIDS and Viral Hepatitis, Paris, France• Nils Lonberg, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Westport, CT• Michele Maio, Italian Network for Tumor Biotherapy, Milan, Italy• Svetomir Markovic, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN• Jens-Peter Marschner, Merck Serono, Geneva, Switzerland• Cornelis J.M. Melief, Leiden University Medical Center and ISA Pharmaceuticals, Leiden, The Netherlands• Martin G. Myers, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX• Javier Pinilla-Ibarz, Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, FL• Jill O’Donnell-Tormey, Cancer Research Institute, New York, NY• Raj Puri, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Washington, DC• Antoni Ribas, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA• Lupe G. Salazar, University of Washington, Seattle, WA• Rafick Pierre Sékaly, Vaccine & Gene Therapy Institute, Port St. Lucie, Florida• Shalini Sharp, Agenus, Lexington, MA• Frederic Triebel, Immutep S.A., Orsay, France• Robert Vonderheide, Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA• Jedd D. Wolchok, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY• Laurence Zitvogel, Institut Gustave-Roussy, Villejuif, France
More information about the Colloquium and registration instructions can be found online at http://bit.ly/cancer-immunotherapy.
About the Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium of the Cancer Research Institute
The Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium (CIC), a program of the Cancer Research Institute, is an international association of more than eighty pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and academic institutions that share a common interest in immunotherapy research and development. CIC’s mission is to improve patient care by making cancer immunotherapies part of the standard-of-care in oncology. CIC provides a platform that allows its stakeholders to advance the field by working together to achieve solutions to scientific and developmental challenges creating a single and powerful voice within the biomedical research community. From these collaborative, community-wide efforts, CIC has developed and published a number of landmark recommendations for practical solutions to key challenges in the field, including the development of new immune related response criteria and clinical trial endpoints for evaluation of cancer immunotherapy impact on patient health. Founded in 2002 as the Cancer Vaccine Consortium (CVC), CIC amended its name in early 2010 to represent more accurately the broader diversity of the many promising clinical developments in immune-based treatment of cancer beside vaccines, including monoclonal antibodies and other modulators of immunity. For more information, visit www.cancerresearch.org/consortium.
About the Cancer Research Institute
The Cancer Research Institute (CRI), established in 1953, is the world’s only non-profit organization that is dedicated exclusively to transforming cancer patient care by advancing scientific efforts leading to new and effective immune system-based strategies to treat, control, and prevent cancer. Guided by a world-renowned Scientific Advisory Council that includes four Nobel laureates and twenty-nine members of the National Academy of Sciences, CRI has invested nearly $200 million in support of research conducted by immunologists and tumor immunologists at the world’s leading medical centers and universities, and has contributed to many of the key scientific advances that have led to the recent explosion of interest in the potential for immunotherapy to change the face of cancer treatment. To accelerate the pace of progress in the field, CRI convenes and coordinates global collaborations among academics, industry scientists and decision makers, regulatory representatives, and health research associations focused on discovery, development, and refinement of new cancer immunotherapies. A founding visionary and scientific leader in tumor immunology, CRI is helping to shape the emerging field of immuno-oncology, and is ushering in a new era of medical progress to bring more treatment options to cancer patients sooner.
The Cancer Research Institute has one of the lowest overhead expense ratios among non-profit organizations, with more than 85 percent of its resources going directly to the support of its science, medical, and research programs. CRI meets or exceeds all 20 standards of the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance, the most comprehensive U.S. charity evaluation service, and has earned the GuideStar Exchange Seal, indicating our commitment to the transparency of our organizational information to donors, funders, those we serve, the public, and regulators. CRI has also received an 'A' grade for fiscal disclosure and efficiency from the American Institute of Philanthropy as well as top accolades from other charity watchdog organizations. For more information, visit www.cancerresearch.org.
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