On the 12th and 13th of November, Granada Health Technology Park (PTS) hosted an Oncothon. This 2-day event aimed to inspire future pharmaceutical and ICT developments to work together around a number of challenges that the oncology field is facing today. It gathered 145 people in total, including representatives of ONCONET SUDOE partners: the University of Toulouse III Paul Sabatier, BioCat, and the National Centre for Oncological Research (CNIO), the University of Coimbra, the Institute Catalan Oncology and Navarre Biomed.
The meeting brought together professionals from different backgrounds and fields, mainly from Bioinformatics and Biomedical Research, but also including Oncologists, Engineers and researchers from academic and enterprise settings. For two days, these professionals attended talks and workshops in order to face up to a challenge. The participants were asked to propose new ideas and answers on one of two topics:
- Cancer Interception: Propose a strategy for developing a diagnostic test and associated surrogate endpoints that would serve to identify the individuals with premalignities that are more likely to progress, and establish methods of measurement of the clinical response of a patient with a high cancer risk and who will receive treatment.
- Big Data & Cancer Genomics: Propose ideas and solutions to answer five challenges: Integrating different Omics for Biomarker discovery, Biomarker association with disease progression, survival and treatments response, drug discovery and personalized treatment, characterization of cancer driver genes and mutation, challenges in classification and deep learning in genomics data
The 91 participants were divided into 9 interdisciplinary groups of up to 10 people. 6 teams tackled the “Big Data & Cancer Genomics” topic and 4 teams took up the “Cancer Interception” topic. Everybody brainstormed enthusiastically and worked hard with the help of mentors to come up with convincing and innovative results to the panel of judges. Finding solutions in such a short amount of time was a challenge, but all the teams were successfully able to present a 5 minute pitch of their conclusions.
The two winning teams of “Big Data & Cancer Genomics” were Team 2 and Team 3, and the winners of “Cancer Interception” were Team C and Team G.
Each winning team was awarded 3,000€ and mentoring services to help the finance and develop their ideas.
In the last evening, ONCONET SUDOE partners, mentors and speakers were treated to a guided tour of the Old city centre.