Functional and Clinical Insight in Hormone Dependent Cancers

The Gordon Research Conference (GRC) and the associated Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) on Hormone Dependent Cancer will bring together basic biologists, cancer modellers and clinicians who are focused on understanding hormone dependent cancer and ways of improving the treatment of these diseases.

The major themes will include understanding cancer pathways and processes, how these are corrupted or altered during cancer progression and how novel therapies work mechanistically and what impact cancer perturbations (i.e. mutations) have on the activity of these therapies. In parallel, a major focus will be the development, validation and application of better, more physiologically relevant models for studying hormone dependent cancer and investigation into the role of the tumor microenvironment. A recent advance in the field has been the understanding and exploitation of pathway cross-talk in hormone dependent cancer, which will also compose a part of the conference. Several distinct levels of biology will be represented in this meeting, including the hormones/ligands, the receptors, the downstream transcription factors that mediate the gene expression events and the role of DNA and genetic mutations in this process. Whilst a small part of the meeting will focus on these variables in normal healthy tissue, the bulk of the meeting will address these variables in the context of cancer and the events that go awry during disease development and progression.