Meeting Report

The 4 th International Symposium on Targeted Anticancer Therapies (TAT 2006) has demonstrated that this annual meeting series has come of age. It provides an excellent forum for the presentation and discussion of virtually all aspects of targeted anticancer therapies in (pre)clinical development. TAT 2006 was the second meeting in this series organized as a partnership meeting between the NDDO Research Foundation and ESMO.

Compared to the meeting in 2005, some important adjustments in the focus and the format of the meeting have been implemented successfully in 2006. These included the focussing on early-phase clinical development, resulting in more original presentations on phase I and II studies, and stricter abstract review, resulting in a higher rejection rate and better overall quality of the scientific presentations.

TAT 2006 witnessed the start of a special task force on 'Methodology for the Development of Innovative Cancer Therapies' (MDICT). This forum of experts from academia, industry and regulatory agencies attempts to develop practical guidance on the optimal development of innovative anticancer agents. Dr. Elizabeth Eisenhauer presented an extensive summary of MDICT's first session on important issues in the design of phase I studies of targeted agents in the main symposium. A separate report on the first MDICT meeting is under preparation and will be offered for publication in a scientific journal.



Professor Paul Workman (left) receives the NDDO Award 2006 from Dr. Coenraad van Kalken, Director NDDO Research Foundation (right) during the TAT 2006 Opening Ceremony.


One of the highlights was the NDDO Award Lecture on 'Adventures in targeted cancer therapy: From tumour hypoxia to the cancer genome', presented by professor Paul Workman from the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton, UK. Professor Workman and his co-workers have an impressive track record in drug design and discovery as well as in early-phase clinical and translational research.

Much attention has recently been drawn by drugs showing promising clinical activity in advanced renal cell cancer. In his Keynote Lecture, professor Martin Gore reviewed the most advanced drugs in clinical development, sorafenib (Nexavar ®) and sunitinib (Sutent ®), together with several promising drug candidates with less mature data. Sorafenib and sunitinib have recently obtained regulatory approval for this indication in the USA, the European Union, and several other countries.

Among the many agents in active preclinical and clinical development and discussed during TAT 2006, AMN107 stood out by its remarkable clinical activity in a phase I study in imatinib-resistant CML. AMN107 is a novel inhibitor of Bcr-Abl, the target of imatinib (Glivec ®) in chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML).

Overall, well over 400 people representing 42 different countries attended TAT 2006, a clear increase in attendance over TAT 2005. About 70% of delegates were from European countries, 20% from the USA and Canada, and 10% from the rest of the world. Compared to TAT 2005, the relative size of the delegations from Asia and the rest of the world has increased at the expense of European delegations, illustrating the further globalization of the TAT series. Delegates’ evaluations of various aspects of TAT 2006 ranged between 3.2 and 4.2 on a scale from 1 to 5.

The next meeting, TAT 2007, has been scheduled for March 8-10, 2007.