The Cancer Prevention Research conference is a new annual conference hosted by the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, and Cancer Research UK. The conference aims to help create a new-look cancer prevention research community, and to showcase research to better understand cancer aetiology, risk factors, intervention development and implementation, and health inequalities in cancer prevention. The conference is built on a philosophy of using advances in mechanistic understanding to inform more effective ways of preventing cancer (precision prevention). The Cancer Prevention Research conference was held this year from 25-27th June in Boston, USA.
Oxford participation
There was strong Oxford involvement in this conference:
Professor Ahmed Ahmed (Nuffield Department of Women’s and Reproductive Health) gave the first talk in the session on “Mechanistic insights informing prevention strategies”. He described the work in his lab to understand the development of serous ovarian cancer and opportunities for prevention.
Professor Sarah Blagden (Department of Oncology) facilitated and spoke in a panel discussion on optimising partnerships with community research partners. She shared the work we’re doing in Oxford to involve patients and the public in our cancer research (more information on PPI on the Oxford Cancer website). Sarah also co-chaired and gave a talk in the session on “Precision prevention in high risk populations”, describing the design of precision prevention trials in the Oncology Clinical Trials Unit, including MILI and the future LungVax trial, accompanied by serial sampling to enable further mechanistic studies.
Professor Anneke Lucassen (Centre for Human Genetics) provided context to the session on “Deepening understand of risk”, arguing that the implications of new methods to assess risk, such as newborn genetic screening or polygenic risk scores, need to be fully evaluated before such schemes are implemented.
Professor Sir Richard Peto (Nuffield Department of Population Health) presented a special lecture to mark 60 years since establishing the link between smoking and cancer, highlighting that work still needs to be done to reduce smoking-associated deaths.
There were also poster presentations from:
- Haige An “Diurnal variation in the human blood proteome: a cross-sectional study in the UK Biobank”
- Dr Josh Atkins “Identifying proteomic risk factors for cancer using prospective and exome analyses: 1,463 circulating proteins and risk of 19 cancers in the UK Biobank”
- Dr Stephanie Chan “Prospective and genetic analyses implicate immunosurveillance in the aetiology of prostate cancer”
- Jennifer Collister “Assessing the value of incorporating a polygenic risk score with non genetic factors for predicting breast cancer diagnosis in the UK Biobank”
- Alison Dillman “High-throughput proteomics and risk of cancer: A systematic review and meta-analysis”
- Dr Toral Gathani “Ethnicity and breast cancer incidence in over 361,000 women in England 2011-2019: a population based study”
- Dr Chibuzor Ogamba “Exploring drug repurposing opportunities for cancer prevention using Genetics”
- Zoe Grenville “Perturbations in the blood metabolome up to a decade before prostate cancer diagnosis in 4,387 matched case-control sets from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition”
- Bowen Liu “Diabetes as an independent risk factor for cancer: prospective evidence from 2.2 million UK and Chinese adults”
- Dr Keren Papier “Diet-wide analyses for risk of colorectal cancer: prospective study of 12,250 incident cases among 543,000 women in the UK”
Success for OxCODE travel awardees
OxCODE competitively funds the attendance of early career researchers (students and post-doctoral researchers, or equivalent) at major cancer prevention and early detection conferences to raise the profile of Oxford’s early detection and precision prevention research. This year’s OxCODE travel awardees for prevention research exceled, both winning poster prizes:
- Dr Zhe Huang with his poster on “Proteomic risk factors for prostate cancer: a case-cohort study in EPIC” won in the category “Deepening Understanding of Risk”
- Holly Eggington with her poster “BMP modulation suppresses the stem cell niche to prevent disease onset in a model of hereditary colorectal cancer” won in the category “Mechanistic Insights Informing Prevention Strategies” and was also selected to give a flash talk to all conference attendees.
Well done to all contributors and we look forward to the next Cancer Prevention of Research conference in London 18-20th June 2025!