Personalized cancer care conference.

The Oslo University Hospital (Norway), the K.G. Jebsen Centre for Breast Cancer Research (Norway), The Radiumhospital Foundation (Norway) and the Fritz-Bender-Foundation (Germany) designed under the conference chairmen (E. Mihich, K.S. Zänker, A.L. Borresen-Dale) and advisory committee (A. Borg, Z. Szallasi, O. Kallioniemi, H.P. Huber) a program at the cutting edge of "PERSONALIZED CANCER CARE: Risk prediction, early diagnosis, progression and therapy resistance." The conference was held in Oslo from September 7 to 9, 2012 and the science-based presentations concerned six scientific areas: (1) Genetic profiling of patients, prediction of risk, late side effects; (2) Molecular profiling of tumors and metastases; (3) Tumor-host microenvironment interaction and metabolism; (4) Targeted therapy; (5) Translation and (6) Informed consent, ethical challenges and communication. Two satellite workshops on (i) Ion Ampliseq-a novel tool for large scale mutation detection; and (ii) Multiplex RNA ISH and tissue homogenate assays for cancer biomarker validation were additionally organized. The report concludes that individual risk prediction in carcinogenesis and/or metastatogenesis based on polygenic profiling may be useful for intervention strategies for health care and therapy planning in the future. To detect distinct and overlapping DNA sequence alterations in tumor samples and adjacent normal tissues, including point mutations, small insertions or deletions, copy number changes and chromosomal rearrangements will eventually make it possible to design personalized management plans for individualized patients. However, large individualized datasets need a new approach in bio-information technology to reduce this enormous data dimensionally to simply working hypotheses about health and disease for each individual.