Later this week we’ll be heading to the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR 2015), held this year April 18-22 at the massive Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. AACR is a master class for the most cutting-edge science related to understanding, diagnosing, and treating cancer. Attended by thousands of researchers and clinicians each year, the conference is the best cancer-focused meeting around. The AACR meeting is notable for a number of reasons, but two of our favorites are its well-rounded program and its focus on career advice. A quick skim of this year’s agenda shows that a wide range of topics will be covered, including immunotherapy, stem cells, epigenetics, and noncoding RNA. For students (really, for scientists at any career stage), AACR is an unmatched source of career education and professional advancement information. We’re pleased to see a full series of career advice sessions sprinkled throughout the meeting to help shape the future paths of these promising young researchers. There are several lectures and panel sessions that we’re particularly looking forward to this year. AACR always does an excellent job recognizing talent, and we’re eager to hear from Caltech’s David Baltimore, Bill Hahn of Dana-Farber, and current AACR president Carlos Arteaga at Vanderbilt during just a few of the great award presentations and distinguished lectures. There are also several sessions focused on using genomic data in the clinic, with great speakers such as FDA’s Zivana Tezak, MSKCC’s Ross Levine, and University of Michigan’s Arul Chinnaiyan, to name just a few. We’re also eager to learn more about the latest from CSER, the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Program, which has been helping to elucidate the utility of genetic variants found in tumors. The scientists and clinicians working on CSER are really making a difference in how the community understands variants as well as differences in how they’re interpreted across labs. This is important work, and we can’t wait to hear from several participants at this special AACR session. Mark your calendar for our presentation:
Don’t miss our poster sessions:
In addition, QIAGEN Bioinformatics will have a booth at the event (#2162), and we encourage AACR attendees to stop by. We’ll be showcasing Ingenuity Variant Analysis, CLC Biomedical Genomics Workbench, and BIOBASE PharmacoGenomic Mutation Database (PGMD) — and of course we’d be happy to answer questions about how any of our other products can help. We hope to see you in Philly!