The most famous and successful of these drugs is imatinib, approved for the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia, gastrointestinal stromal tumor and many other cancers. But there are several other drugs that have also entered the arena, including, to name just a few: gefitinib, a drug for lung cancer that targets the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGF-R) tyrosine kinase; bevacizumab for colon, breast and lung cancers; and bortezomib for multiple myeloma. Despite the success of many of these drugs, however, there are challenges of nonresponders to the drugs, and of resistance to the therapy after a period of use.

To develop effective targeted treatments, researchers must first identify and characterize the molecular players in the signaling pathways important in each of these cancers. Some genes, such as RAS, have commonly mutated across a variety of cancers, but have not yet yielded good drug candidates for treatment.

The meeting united leading experts from both academia and the pharmaceutical industry, who brought their unique perspective to the problems inherent in rational drug design. This included two Nobel Prize winners, J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus, the discovers of oncogenes. Together, the scientists focused on the steps required to design drugs that target pathways involving genes such as RAS, PI3K and PTEN, mobilizing the immune system against tumors, and combating resistance to targeted therapies.

As well as Michael Bishop (UCSF, San Francisco, USA) and Harold Varmus (Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA), 1989 Nobel Prize winners for Medicine, the leading experts invited to present their works were: Julian Adams (Infinity Pharmaceuticals Inc., Cambridge, USA), James Allison (Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA), José Baselga (Vall d’Hebron University Hospital, Barcelona, Spain), Frederic De Sauvage (Genentech Inc., South San Francisco, USA), Hugues de Thé (CNRS, Université de Paris, Paris, France), Hervé Fridman (Inserm U 255, Paris, France), Gary Gilliland (Harvard University, Boston, USA), John Kuriyan (University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, USA), Alexander Levitzki (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel), Victoria Richon (Epizyme, Inc., Cambridge, USA), William R. Sellers (Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, USA), Kevan Shokat (University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, USA) and Gregory Verdine (Harvard University, Cambridge, USA).

La Fondation Ipsen

Established in 1983 under the aegis of the Fondation de France, the mission of La Fondation Ipsen is to contribute to the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge. The long-standing action of La Fondation Ipsen is aimed at furthering the interaction between researchers and clinical practitioners, which is indispensable due to the extreme specialisation of these professions. The ambition of La Fondation Ipsen is not to offer definitive knowledge, but to initiate a reflection about the major scientific issues of the forthcoming years. It has developed an important international network of scientific experts who meet regularly at meetings known as Colloques Médecine et Recherche, dedicated to six main themes: Alzheimer's disease, neurosciences, longevity, endocrinology, the vascular system and cancer science. In 2007, La Fondation Ipsen started three new series of meetings. The first is in partnership with the Salk Institute and Nature and is an annual meeting which focuses on aspects of Biological Complexity; the second is the “Emergence and Convergence” series with Nature with 4 workshops a year, and the third annual meeting is with Cell and the Massachusetts General Hospital entitled “Exciting Biologies”. Since its beginning, La Fondation Ipsen has organised more than 100 international conferences, published 69 volumes with renowned publishers and more than 205 issues of a widely distributed newsletter Alzheimer Actualités. It has also awarded more than 100 prizes and grants.