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Canary Summit Brings Early Cancer Detection Researchers Together

May 10, 2016

More than 100 members of Stanford University’s scientific community met Tuesday, May 4 at the University Club in Palo Alto. Although their backgrounds were different, they had one major thing in common: cancer early detection. The event – the first ever Canary Summit – allowed researchers to share their work in that field, which ranged from innovative early detection using molecular imaging and cancer biomarkers, to the development of new technologies and medical devices for detecting cancer in its most early stages.

All those present were faculty and associates of the Canary Center at Stanford, a world-class facility dedicated to cancer early detection research programs. The Canary Foundation was instrumental in establishing the center and continues to fund it significantly.

At the Summit, the Canary Foundation awarded a $50,000 seed grant and committed to awarding $200,000 more in seed grants for attendees of the event to fund their research.

Scientists were encouraged to create posters that illustrated the focus and findings of their early detection research, and attendees voted on the best posters.

Top poster winners were:

• First Place: Intravascular magnetic enrichment of circulating tumor cells. Jessie Ge (presenting author). Authors: Tianjia J. Ge, Amin Aalipour, Ophir Vermesh and Sanjiv S. Gambhir.

• Second Place: NFIB is a novel metastasis-specific biomarker of small cell lung cancer. Jessika Baral (presenting author). Authors: Jessika Baral, Dian Yang and Julien Sage.

• Third Place: Label-free Magnetophoretic Isolation of Circulating Tumor Cells and Clusters from Blood. Jaeyoung Yang (presenting author). Authors: Jaeyoung Yang, N. Gozde Durmus, Hojae Lee, Baris D. Ercal, Ozlem Ercal, Huiping Zhang, Christian Hoerner, Alice C. Fan, Juergen K. Willmann, Ronald W. Davis, Lars Steinmetz and Utkan Demirci.

For more photos of the Canary Summit, visit our album on Facebook.