Please find the list of dissemination actions performed by KidsCancerKinome partners

The KCK consortium invites you to an International Symposium jointly organised by the KidsCancerKinome project and the ITCC network with the support of region Ile de France. The meeting will take place on 30 September 2010 (2 PM – 6 PM) in Paris (Hotel Scipion, 5th arrondissement). The meeting will continue on October 1 with ITCC clinical sessions.

Introduction of the event

The KCK project was implemented by the research labs of the ITCC biology committee. KCK explored and validated new targets and pathways in 6 pediatric malignancies: neuroblastoma, medulloblastoma, rhabdomyosarcoma, osteosarcoma, Ewing tumor and acute lymphoblastic leukemias.

ITCC is a European consortium aiming at studying new drugs in phase I and II. The new drug development strategy is biology-driven and the KCK results will provide meaningfull information for the drug prioritisation program to be run by ITCC.

Thus, a joint KCK/ITCC meeting is held on September 30th. The results of the KCK project (in all diseases) will be presented and discussed with the participants of the ITCC clinical network in order to streamline drug prioritisation for phase I and II.

UKB introduced an abstract on the functional role of Aurora kinases in medulloblastomas:

During this event (Advances in Neuroblastoma Research - http://anr2010.com/), AMC published an abstract on the role of Aurora kinases in neuroblastoma:

AMC (Marcel Kool) and UKB (Martin Holst) took part in the ISPNO event. The following abstract have been introduced:

The goal of this workshop organised in cooperation with KCK (with the participation of the partner IGR and ICR) was to share the KidsCancerKinome results in rhabdomyosarcoma with other European research laboratories running a research program on rhabdomyosarcoma, along with the pediatric oncologists in charge of new drug development and therapeutic research in this disease, adult oncologists in the field of sarcoma and representatives of the European medicine agency. The ultimate goal was to build a biology-driven strategy for introducing innovative therapies in the treatment of pediatric rhabdomyosarcomas.

The KidsCancerKinome partner CURIE took part in the AACR 101st Annual Meeting 2010, April 17-21, 2010, at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. Its general title for this year session was “Conquering Cancer Through Discovery Research”.
Please find the abstract and the poster that have been registered to this conference.

IOR partner of the project took part in these two events and introduced their work performed in KCK.

This meeting was focused on molecular targets and cancer therapeutics. AMC introduced several abstracts

Jan Molenaar et al.
Abstract C114: The KidsCancerKinome: Validation of CDK2 as potential drug target in pediatric tumors

Ellen Westerhout et al.
Abstract C115: The KidsCancerKinome: Validation of Aurora kinases as potential drug targets in pediatric tumors

Huib Caron et al.
Abstract C116: The KidsCancerKinome: Validation of drug targets for high risk childhood cancers

A presentation of KCK and the role of biology in prioritizing drugs for development in pediatric malignancies was done by Huib Caron (the partner AMC of KidsCancerKinome) in this training course dedicated to all aspects of new drug development in children and adolescents with cancer.

The preliminary KCK data have been presented by Huib Caron from AMC at the NCI EORCT AACR meeting (symposium on “Molecular targets and Cancer Therapeutics”) in Geneva in last October 2008.

Published abstract

KidsCancerKinome: a EU-FP6 project for preclinical kinase inhibitor evaluation as a tool to prioritize compounds for paediatric development

KidsCancerKinome will make a comprehensive analysis of the human protein kinase family. Protein kinases are already excellent targets for many small inhibitory molecules and antibodies designed for adult tumours. Six aggressive childhood tumours (neuroblastoma, medulloblastoma, rhabdomyosarcoma, osteosarcoma, Ewing sarcoma and acute lymphocytic leukaemia) will be addressed. These six tumours are responsible for 50% of childhood cancer deaths. RNAi knockdown of kinase expression by viral shRNA libraries will be applied to test the human kinase gene family for tumour-driving kinases in cell lines. We first focus on the ‘drugged kinases’. Effective lentiviral shRNA vectors are currently being tested for CDK2, AURKA+B, IGF1R, ALK and PIK3CA kinases in cell line panels of each of the 6 tumours. The next series of kinases will include KIT, MET, AKT3, FYN, MEK5+6, PDGFRA, PLK1 and RAF1. Mutation and functional screening of candidate ‘tumour driving’ kinase genes will be perfomed subsequently in large series of tumour samples. High-throughput 454 direct sequencing is ongoing for a series of 13 kinases. Tissue arrays of >600 tumor samples are available to analyse protein expression and phosphorylation status of kinases. In vitro activity of novel kinase inhibitors being developed for adult oncology against the peadiatric tumour-driving kinases will be tested, including readouts of target inhibition and pathway modulation. When no inhibitor is available, a novel generation of antisense oligonucleotide inhibitor drugs (LNAs) will be developed. In vivo validation of efficacy for successful compounds will be performed in established xenograft models of the six childhood tumour types. KidsCancer Kinome will contribute to a better understanding of the unique paediatric tumour biology and to the development of new drugs.

Huib Caron from AMC introduced KidsCancerKinome during the ASPO postgraduate course in Amsterdam in January 2008 : http://www.amc.nl/upload/ASPO%2014-17%20januari%202008.pdf