Were in for a thrill, said Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellman, MD, MPH, as she kicked off a special day-long symposium recognizing the winners of the 2014 Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences at Genentech Halls Byers Auditorium on Dec. 13. It was the centerpiece of a two-day celebration hosted by UCSF.

The morning got off to a rousing start with a talk about advancements in cancer genetics. The disease was a mystery when Bert Vogelstein, MD, began his career in the mid-1970s.

Though President Richard Nixon had declared a metaphoric war on cancer, the scientific community didnt know who the enemy was, said Vogelstein, director of the Ludwig Center for Cancer Genetics and Therapeutics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann welcomes attendees

to the daylong symposium.

Forty years later we know our enemy well, he said, having identified about 150 driver genes that exert their effects in about 12 pathways.

In a lecture peppered with military metaphors, Vogelstein said we have moved past the conventional warfare of chemotherapy to targeted therapies, and have recently been recruiting the allies of the immune system. But it is crucial, he said, to begin pre-emptive strikes.

If Plan A of the War on Cancer was finding a way to cure advanced cancers, he said, it is time to initiated Plan B: identifying biomarkers of very early cancers and eliminating them from the body before they take hold and metastasize.

In keeping with Vogelsteins historical approach, Robert Weinberg, PhD, Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., presented a masterful history of cancer biology beginning with the discovery of the first oncogenes in experiments with carcinogenic chemicals.

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Innovative Researchers Honored for Work Fighting Life-Threatening Diseases

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