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Cancer Drug Resist 2018;1:266-302 Cancer
DOI: 10.20517/cdr.2018.18 Drug Resistance

Meeting Abstracts Open Access

Meeting Abstracts of the BACR conference:
response and resistance in cancer therapy

Canterbury, UK; 10-12 Sep 2018; Published: 19 Dec 2018
Correspondence to: Tim R. Fenton, Michelle D. Garrett, Martin Michaelis, Mark N. Wass, School of Biosciences, University of Kent,
Canterbury CT2 7NJ, UK. E-mails: t.fenton@kent.ac.uk; m.d.garrett@kent.ac.uk; m.michaelis@kent.ac.uk; m.n.wass@kent.ac.uk

1. Targeting chemoresistance induced by MYCN and ALK in neuroblastoma

Louis Chesler

Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK

Neuroblastoma, a tumour of peripheral nerve, is the most common solid tumour of young children and
in high-risk diseases, which comprises approximately half of patients, and the death from chemoresistant,
metastatic relapse is very frequent. Children who relapse exhibit clonal enrichment of two genomic altera-
tions: high-level amplification of the MYCN oncogene, and kinase domain mutations of the anaplastic
lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene. Overall survival in this patient cohort is < 15% at 3 years, and there are few
options for rationally targeted therapy. Neuroblastoma patients exhibit de novo resistance to existing ALK
inhibitors, and no clinical therapeutics to target MYCN has yet been developed. This talk will outline our
efforts to model aberrant expression of MYCN and ALK in neuroblastoma, and to uncover mechanisms of
oncogenic action that are therapeutically targetable using small-molecule inhibitors. We describe a mecha-
nistic interaction in which ALK upregulates MYCN transcription, and discuss clinical trials emerging from
our work to develop transcriptional inhibitors of MYCN, and to identify effective inhibitors of ALK in neu-
roblastoma patients.

2. Clinical application of single cell analysis

Bernhard Polzer

Fraunhofer Item, Regensburg, Germany

Currently, one in four deaths is caused by cancer, mainly as a result of systemic spread and metastatic dis-
ease. Despite new drugs, the currently available therapies are effective only in one in four cancer patients.
An initially successful therapy is often followed by a relapse of the disease after a few months only, which
can be explained by the following two underlying mechanisms: on the one hand, due to the genetic hetero-

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