This past Friday and Saturday the BTC held a research retreat at the Houstonian. A packed program, consisting largely of one-hour sessions with about 5 short presentations and lots of discussion, addressed a broad range of topics.

We started on Friday with one of the most active areas of discussion - the role of cancer stem cells in the growth and treatment of gliomas. The session highlighted shortcomings of current markers and definitions, introduced podoplanin as a contribution in this area and ended with a discussion about mesenchymal stem cells in promoting tumors, and as vehicles for treatment delivery.

The next two sessions highlighted our current clinical trials, both home grown and pharma-sponsored, and explored roadblocks to more rapid and broader clinical translation of other promising approaches - largely these were financial and regulatory, which are tightly connected, as much of the cost of doing clinical trials stems from the burdens imposed by regulations. Follow up is planned to see how we can improve in this critical area, and also how we can overcome some of the barriers to working with other centers.

The morning was rounded off by a discussion of biomarkers in clinical trials, and besides some promising advances that have been made, the question of whether current markers (MGMT, EGFRvIII, PTEN and perhaps a few others) should not be routinely measured for cases in our center - opinions were somewhat divided.

After lunch, we moved to break-out sessions with a Signaling or Epidemiology being followed by Stats or Metastasis and then Epigenetics or Pediatric Tumors. These sessions were more focused on the science and identifying new opportunities to work together and were well attended.

On Saturday we kicked off with a session on some of the multi-investigator efforts in the BTC - SPORE, CERN, TCGA, PO1 and IPCT. Then an interesting session on angiogenesis and microenviroment was followed by two breakouts - one one Drug Development and the other on Autophagy. Then we finished with a discussion on the informatics needs of the BTC.

So how did it go? We are going to send out a survey tomorrow, and I'll come back and post later in the week to tell you.

We are at the first mid-winter meeting of the Brain Cancer SPORE! This is an annual meeting, where each of the SPOREs in the organ group, present their projects, and progress.

As we are the newbies, we got to go first, and got an extra half hour so that we could present our material in a little more depth. Dr. Yung gave an overview of the BTC program and how the SPORE fits in. Then the projects went in order - Dr. Fueyo with targeted adenovirus Project 1; Dr. Colman with gene-expression biomarkers for glioblastoma prognosis; Dr. Yung with PI3K inhibitors and then, by phone, Drs. Meyers and Bondy on the genetic factors and neuro-cognitive outcomes study. Dr. Bogler closed with a brief overview of the cores, and the Career Development and Developmental Research Projects.

Our talks were well received - everyone presented opportunities for collaboration and interaction - a key aspect of what this meeting is all about.

Now we are seeing the talks from the other Brain SPORE institutions, and are ourselves looking for ways to work together.

Systems Biology, the counterpoint to reductionist science, is a coming thing. With the ever increasing availability of high-throughput technology it is becoming accessible. With the realization that defects in single genes, or even pathways, can not explain complex diseases, it is becoming a necessity. And with the advent of this year's Annual Symposium on Cancer Research, it is coming to MD Anderson!

At the end of October, on R11, there will be a fantastic, 3-day meeting on Systems Biology - everyone in the BTC interested in the analysis of more than one gene at a time, is strongly encouraged to attend. You can see more information on the meeting here: www.mdanderson.org/ascr.

See you there!