The CNIO welcomes the new academic year with a spotlight on cancer genetics

The Distinguished Seminars series, the most prestigious scientific conferences at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), welcome the new academic year with a double bill focusing on cancer genetics next Thursday and Friday. The conference schedule will last until next June, with over 30 scientific talks of international excellence.

The Nobel laureate Robert Huber, from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (Germany), will give a talk next Thursday, September 6th, on cellular mechanisms used to degrade faulty or unnecessary proteins, processes whose failure can lead to serious diseases. The lecture, titled Intracellular proteolysis, structures, mechanisms and drug design, will be held at the CNIO Auditorium at 12:00.

On Friday 7th, Peter Campbell, researcher at The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (UK) and co-director of the Cancer Genome Project in the UK, will explain what scientists hope to learn from the genomic analysis of 50 different tumour types, and its role in future cancer treatments. The talk is titled Interrogating the architecture of cancer genomes and will also be held at the CNIO Auditorium at 12:00 noon.

A talk by Kári Stefánsson is also scheduled for the first half of September. Stefánsson, a neurologist who will give a lecture on Friday 14th titled The genetics of common traits, works for Decode Genetics (Iceland). A company which thanks to an especial agreement has spent the last years studying the medical and genetic data of Icelanders.

Their latest research, published last month, describes the relationship between paternal age and children's susceptibility to some genetic diseases. On its website, Decode Genetics boasts to have discovered "key genetic risk factors for dozens of common diseases, from cardiovascular diseases to cancer."

This ambitious programme brings world leaders in scientific research to Spain every year. The full programme of the Distinguished Seminars series and other conferences organized by the CNIO is available at www.cnio.es, Scientific Events section.

Provided by Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncologicas (CNIO)