I saw a few recorded presentations due to covid, notably from UK, but 78% of registrants attended in person, they said.
Although I sent a poster, I selected online/virtual attendance, and browsing streamed live/recorded symposium sessions from my home or office. I may have gotten too used to the comfort of working from home.
Live meeting is far better for meeting people. I know. But if we focus mainly on catching up with recent scientific advances, especially in research fields I am only loosely following, virtual is pretty good.
As AACR is a big meeting, several symposium occur simultaneously. We had to choose which to attend. Recorded streaming of sessions just solved the "I cannot be in two places at a time" problem. The session recordings should be available until 7/13/22. I'll take some time to watch missed sessions next week.
Notable things 2022;
New plenary symposium on cancer evolution and on precancer discovery science. Taken up in a plenary session means the subfield has been recognized as a part of mainstream research field. The presenters are scientists working on the field for long (decades), far before the big stage is set up for the first time. Rome was not built in a day.
Thanks to accumulated DNA/RNA sequencing data and bioinformatics, cancer analysis has reached another level.
Newer technologies such as single cell sequencing, spatial biology, and tumor linage analysis are providing high-resolution descriptions on cancer development and its biology previously not available. The data are not only descriptive, but hypothesis-generating. They are not cheap yet, though. In our core facility, single cell sequencing costs about $3600/sample. Still, usually, "just do it" is the best answer.
Notion of tumor microenvironment has become commonplace. Different fields (e.g., aging) are using the notion.
Speaking of aging, NCI and NIA are cooperating to keep providing funding for the "aging and cancer" field. It makes sense, especially with the effects of aging being described at a finer level with aforementioned newer technologies. We will see what grows out of the funding in coming years.
Also, a reminder;
Cancer research is science, and numbers play a major role in the game. As cancer research has become a game of big data, it is easy to forget the dots/lines represent people. Got to be careful with that.
I got a few ideas thanks to inspirational sessions. Time to work on the ideas and plans.
[AACR annual meeting 2022, virtual landing page]
