Sigma BioBlogs

AACR is over 100 years old, with a membership of 30,000+.  The membership is quite inclusive, with a mixture of people from basic science research, clinical research, and also physicians, patients, survivors, and patient advocates all intent on studying and learning more about how to stop cancer.

We got the chance to meet many of them, and a few answered the question “Where does your bio begin? (You can still enter your video too!).

Communication, collaboration, research and education are all a part of AACR’s mission, with 6 Cancer journals for the thousands of scientist who are members, and also CR magazine, to provide information directly relevant for cancer patients, survivors, and patient advocates.

For AACR 2010, the volcanic ash prevented many European presenters from attending, so AACR shifted and met the need by patching the speakers through via video and teleconference.  Some of the recorded talks are here.

Plus an amazing twitter feed which is still active 4 days post-meeting as bloggers sift through their notes and communicate the information that they gathered during the meeting.

The science has come a long way too.  Many traditional topics were under exploration, such as studies around Ras and p53,  there  were also discussions about newer technologies for  such as microRNAs, using biomarkers for early detection,  nanotechnology, and systems biology.

Some blogs of note:

Sally Church’s blog. This lady knows the cancer community.  I got the chance to have coffee with her and she knew half the researchers walking in and out of the conference hall.

Nature writer Brian Maher has a series of short blogs about the sessions he attended.

Another look at Bert Vogelstein’s talk…

This AACR video details some fascinating statistics on cancer research