VIII International Congress of the Metastasis Research Society

Two award lectures were given: the Paget-Ewing award lecture was given by Isaiah Fidler (University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, USA) who gave an overview of the recent developments in the "seed and soil" hypothesis; Stephen Carter (Sugen, USA) gave the Kurt Hellmann award lecture, a new award in honour of those who have made an outstanding contribution in translating the problems of research in metastatic disease from the laboratory to the clinic.The opening session consisted of a workshop entitled "Novel technologies and bioinformatics". Lance Liotta (NIH, Bethesda, USA) and Emmanual Petricoin (Center for Biological Evaluation and Research, FDA, Bethesda, USA) gave an overview of the advances that can be applied to molecular analysis of tissues, enabling thousands of molecular events to be studied simultaneously. The problem of the multistep polygenetic phenotype with more than one metastasis gene or predictive marker requires the development of technology that is capable of studying simultaneous multiple events. Techniques such as laser capture microdissection (LCM) to isolate the neoplastic cells followed by analysis using a combination of 2D gel electrophoresis and surface-enhanced laser desorption and ionisation (SELDI) can be used to investigate the complex protein patterns involved in metastasis as well as the traditional cDNA microarrays. Not unexpectedly, the changes identified cluster into four groups concerned with unrestrained growth, motility, invasion, evasion of host defenses and angiogenesis.Donald Ingber (Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA) introduced the session by reviewing work on how biochemical pathways may be modified by the structure of a cell both by its internal structure (principally the cytoskeleton) and by external structures in the microenvironment surrounding a cell. The extracellular-intracellular tensions are largely maintained by integrins acting as a bridge between these structures. Reactions inside cells take pla