How Alterations in DNA Sequence and Chromatin Modifications Impact Cancer Etiology and Therapy

The 2019 Conference on Cancer Genetics and Epigenetics will focus on newly emerging aspects of the field including the genetic heterogeneity of cancer, the “long tail” of less frequent cancer mutations and the importance of intratumoral heterogeneity as assayed by single cell technologies. The importance of the non-coding genome in cancer will be highlighted as well as the rapidly evolving field of RNA epigenetics. Sessions on the lessons learned from genome wide surveys of cancer susceptibility as assayed by CRISPR screens and descriptions of cancer epigenomes will be complemented by talks on basic mechanism of gene regulation relevant to cancer and how genetically and epigenetically targeted therapies can be applied to specific tumor types. It has become increasingly apparent that the organization of the genome across temporal and spatial domains plays a large role in the control of cancer gene expression patterns and tumor biology and a session on the “4-D Nucleome” and cancer is planned. The large amounts of data generated by modern cancer genetic and epigenetic experiments require new modes of computational and systems analysis which will be discussed in sessions. This meeting should appeal to a wide range of cancer researchers and molecular biologists seeking to apply their work to cancer. In addition to an outstanding set of invited speakers there will be several interactive poster sessions, one minute "poster preview" talks and several talks selected for platform presentation from the submitted abstracts.