With TAT 2008 being organized in Bethesda, MD, for the first time a meeting in the highly successful series of annual International Symposia on Targeted Anticancer Therapies will be organized outside of Amsterdam, where the meeting concept matured over the past years. From now on, meetings in this series will be organized with the venue alternating between Europe (Amsterdam) and the USA (the Washington-Bethesda area). This new phase in the history of the meeting series was prompted by the joining of NCI as our U.S. partner in early 2007 next to ESMO, our European partner as of 2005. With ESMO and NCI on board, the organizational and scientific bases of the TAT series are stronger than ever before.

Apart from having a U.S. venue every other year as of 2008, we plan to leave the meeting concept largely unchanged compared to the past few meetings. Thus, TAT 2008 will maintain all the attractive characteristics of TAT 2007 and will fit seamlessly into NDDO’s longstanding tradition of top-level ‘new drug meetings’ in oncology. The venue reserved for TAT 2008, the Marriott Bethesda North Hotel & Conference Center, offers an excellent environment for a medium-sized, focused meeting composed of plenary sessions only, close personal interactions and extensive discussion among delegates and faculty, e.g. during the poster sessions, the breaks, and the social events.

Like the previous meetings in this series, TAT 2008 will cover the broad array of innovative anticancer agents with a defined, cancer-specific, molecular target, including the most promising ones in preclinical and clinical development. The program will also provide updates on approved targeted agents undergoing further clinical evaluation and will address methodological and regulatory issues in anticancer drug development. The TAT 2008 program will cover:

• Overviews of targeted anticancer agents under active development
• Recent results of early-phase clinical and translational research
• Updates on approved targeted agents
• Identification of new molecular targets and their validation
• Drug discovery and preclinical drug profiles
• Molecular diagnosis and patient selection for targeted therapies
• Methodological and regulatory issues in the development of targeted therapies

The scientific program will consist of keynotes and reviews by renown international experts, proffered papers and poster presentations. No parts of the program will be overlapping or be run in parallel providing participants the opportunity to take benefit of the entire program.