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Posts Tagged ‘Early Detection Symposium’
Cancer Early Detection in 2013: Canary Foundation Leads the Way
January 9, 2013
Everyone here at Canary Foundation is looking forward to an exceptional year filled with challenges and scientific milestones for our program teams working on early cancer detection research in ovarian, breast, lung, pancreatic and prostate cancer.
We’re starting the year with a bang! We’ll host our first event of the year on February 8: our annual Ladies’ Luncheon featuring Jesse Draper (most famously known as the host of The Valley Girl Show), who will interview Canary Foundation Founder Don Listwin and Director of CCS and Chair of Radiology Dr. Sam Gambhir on the latest news in early cancer detection. It’s not too late to register!
This February is also the one-year anniversary of our Breast Cancer Early Detection Program. Canary Foundation scientists are collaborating with the Cancer Prevention Institute of California to study pre-diagnostic breast cancer samples for potential breast cancer biomarkers.
Another upcoming milestone is related to our ongoing research on microbubble imaging technology. We hope (and expect) to begin testing of microbubbles on patients at Stanford in 2013. Keep your eye out for news of impeding FDA approval of microbubble technology – we’ll be sure to share it with you when the news finally breaks!
You might have read that the Canary Center at Stanford will be moving to a new campus this year. The move to the Porter Street Campus is scheduled for late summer or early fall, to a facility about twice the size of our present building. The Canary Foundation offices will move also, due to Stanford University needing the current location for new uses. We’re all very excited about settling in to our new digs.
If you’ve ever been to a Canary Challenge ride, you’ll know what all the fuss is about! On September 28, 2013, we plan to host over 1,000 cyclists and raise $1 million or more for the Stanford Cancer Institute. The ride will start off from VMware in Palo Alto as it did in 2012. Teams of four or more are encouraged to sign up to participate, and we have a brand new 5K Ride/Walk to accompany the 50K, 75K, 100K and 100-mile rides this year. We encourage you to start building your teams now!
The annual Canary Early Detection Symposium will be hosted this year on October 15, 2013. This event brings together scientists, researchers and high tech industry to solve problems and collaborate in the field of early cancer detection in all of the Canary program areas.
It’s going to be a great year, and we invite you to book your calendars and join us as we raise money, celebrate successes, and forge our way ahead through new horizons in cancer early detection research!
Highlights from the 8th Annual Early Detection Symposium 2012
May 7, 2012
Canary Foundation held the Eighth Annual Early Detection Symposium at Stanford University on May 1, 2012. Nearly 200 participants came together to share their successes, challenges, and visions for the field of early detection of cancer. The conference session included updates from four Canary cancer teams (Lung, Ovary, Pancreas and Prostate) as well as presentations on innovative early detection research from across the country. Dr. Sam Gambhir, Director of the Canary Center at Stanford, described the goals of early detection in three key phrases:
- Identify patients that have cancer
- Isolate the location of the tumor
- Intervene effectively
Attendees heard from researchers working in all three of these areas.
Tackling the Challenge of Overdiagnosis
One of the challenges in identifying cancer patients is avoiding overtreatment. Dr. Ruth Etzioni of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, an expert on PSA screening, dissected
the recently released guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force stating that the harms of PSA-based screening for prostate cancer outweigh the benefits. Dr. Etzioni presented the case for “smart” PSA screening. Current PSA screening practice results in overdiagnosis and overtreatment of men with less aggressive disease. Smart screening strategies such as age-specific PSA cutoffs combined with biennial screening could potentially reduce the amount of overdiagnosis by one third while retaining the lives saved by annual screening. Smart screening coupled with active surveillance could be of great value in reducing mortality with a much more acceptable ratio of harm to benefit. More »
