Submitted by Catherine Atkins on Fri, 10/10/2025 - 00:00
On Thursday 9th October the Early Cancer Institute hosted its annual symposium, our largest event of the year and the third since our launch as an Institute. This year was certainly the best attended event, with a packed auditorium of just under 200 people! They had gathered to hear from our excellent speakers ranging from internal early career researchers to distinguished senior academics from the UK and overseas, all sharing the latest insights in early cancer detection and prevention.
The Symposium opened with Peter Sasieni, Professor of Cancer Epidemiology at the Wolfson Institute of Population Health, presenting a thought-provoking and challenging perspective on how we might rethink the current approach to screening trials, and in particular whether traditional randomised controlled trials are necessary. This was followed by Clare Turnbull, Professor of Cancer Genetics at the Institute of Cancer Research, who spoke on the use of genomic data to stratify patients according to their cancer risk, offering a compelling look into the future of precision prevention.
A lively Q&A session chaired by ECI Group Leader Dr Siddhartha Kar followed. The audience had so many questions and comments that unfortunately the session had to be cut short, but the enthusiastic engagement continued during the coffee break when delegates also had chance to view the 30 posters on display and discuss with the authors.
The next session featured short talks from early career researchers and we heard from Dr Iñigo Ayestaran, Dr Tamsin Robb and Dr John Lizhe Zhuang, all postdoctoral researchers in the Early Cancer Institute. This is always a popular session and this year's talks were especially well-received. We were very fortunate to have a several members of our Scientific Advisory Board at the Symposium who kindly agreed to sit on the judging panel for this session. One of the judges commented “Very high standard across the board. Difficult to distinguish between contenders!” but Iñigo’s talk just had the edge in the scores and he took away the first prize of £500 towards future conference attendance.
In the final sessions of the afternoon we heard from Dr Malgorzata (Gonia) Gozdecka, Assistant Research Professor in the groups of Professor George Vassiliou and Professor Brian Huntly in the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. She described her recent Nature paper which outlines how metformin, a widely used diabetes drug, could prevent a form of acute myeloid leukaemia in individuals at high risk of the disease.
The Symposium ended with Prof Sarah Blagden, medical oncologist and clinician-scientist at the University of Oxford, giving a thought-provoking talk on cancer prevention advocating for a shift towards targeting precancerous conditions and sharing her vision of one day developing an effective cancer vaccine.
We are very grateful to all our speakers, poster presenters, and judging panel and to our attendees who engaged so well with the event with their insightful questions and observations. We look forward to welcoming everyone back next year!
