EpCam 2023 Meeting Overview
The second Ependymoma Science Meeting, EPCam was held in June 2023, in Cambridge, UK.
We were proud to support this event along with Texas Children’s Hospital and Cancer Research UK. Overall 23 leading experts in ependymoma attended from U.K, Australia, Germany, Netherlands, Canada and U.S.A and presentations covered topics including: cell of origin, models, epigenetics, novel therapies and the current clinical landscape.
As with last year, the level of collaboration and co-operation was remarkable and over the course of the meeting resulted in many stimulating discussions. Collaborative outputs and actions from the meeting include: the sharing of analysis techniques, collaboration on new ependymoma targets and the pooling of resource and models.
This year one of the meeting highlights was the debate session which was held in the Old Divinity School at St John’s College, where delegates discussed the heterogeneity of ependymoma and use of the term ‘ependymoma’ to describe the various disease subtypes. This fed into many of the presentations over the course of the meeting which covered new analysis techniques and molecular profiling for pre-clinical data, as well as clinical and diagnostic work.
Other highlights included a focus on novel targets and therapies, including small molecules, PROTACs and cancer vaccines. We also heard updates from the clinic with focus on the current landscape and CAR-T cell approaches.
Feedback from the meeting attendees was overwhelmingly positive, with the delegates reporting that the scientific value of this meeting was excellent and attending was highly valuable for their future work. Already we are delighted to report follow ups from the meeting regarding new therapeutic targets and drug design approaches.
