The Main Event
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The headline take
Saturday 18.00 PT: Day one of BiOS has been a full-on affair - so full on, in fact, that there’s barely time for me to make my excuses before I head back to the convention centre for the weekend’s main event: the BiOS Hot Topics session (which runs from 7 till 9.30 tonight). For now, a headline take on Saturday is about all I can manage.
Photodynamic therapy (PDT), a technique that uses a light-activated drug to kill cancer cells, was one of the main themes in today’s programme. I went along to hear a couple of invited papers on PDT effects in the tumour microenvironment, as well as catching a “bigger-picture” perspective on the impressive clinical efficacy of PDT in the treatment of early- and later-stage head-and-neck cancers.
One double espresso later (to keep the jetlag in check) and it was time to switch codes from therapeutics to diagnostics. The US National Cancer Institute’s Network for Translational Research in Optical Imaging provided the content for a dedicated session reviewing progress in multimodality imaging for breast cancer, with specific emphasis on the use of diffuse optical imaging in combination with established clinical modalities like CT, MRI and PET.
I’ll post more details on the above tomorrow morning, plus news and views from the Hot Topics session to follow later on Sunday.
