In this insightful and honest conversation, award winners Karin de Visser, Ido Amit and Marta Kovatcheva talk about their research, career journeys, and excitement for the future of cancer research. From curiosity and scientific breakthroughs to diversity and balancing life in the lab, they reflect on what it really means to be a researcher today.
This episode explores the evolution of the cancer field and why optimism is more important than ever in science. The episode ends with a look ahead to the EACR 2025 Congress in Lisbon, where they’ll join fellow scientists from across the globe to share research and shape the future of cancer science.
Our guests in this episode:
- Karin de Visser is winner of the Pezcoller-Marina Larcher Fogazzaro-EACR Women in Cancer Research Award
- Ido Amit is winner of the Pezcoller Foundation-EACR Translational Cancer Research Award
- Marta Kovatcheva is winner of the EACR-Mark Foundation-Pezcoller Foundation Rising Star Award
Listen here, scroll down for the transcript and subscribe now via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music/Audible, Deezer or YouTube so you’ll never miss an episode. You can find all episodes and their transcripts here.
Our host is Alexandra Boitor, EACR Scientific Officer.
Episode transcript
Alexandra: It truly is an honour for me to have you here on our podcast today. I’d like to begin this episode by congratulating all of you for the awards that you’ve won. So, congratulations and thanks again for accepting to have this conversation with me.
The Pezcoller Foundation-EACR Translational Cancer Research Award and the Pezcoller-Marina Larcher Fogazzaro-EACR Women in Cancer Research Award celebrate academic excellence and achievements in fundamental cancer research. Through these two awards, we particularly acknowledge researchers who, through their discoveries, have the potential to future clinical development, and researchers who have, through leadership or by example, furthered the advancement of women in cancer research. And through these awards, the EACR wishes to recognise your merits for the cancer research community. So congratulations, Ido and Karin. My first question to you is, what does this award mean to you personally?
Karin: Thank you very much, it’s an incredible honour. It’s a very big privilege to receive this award and it’s also a recognition of the work that we do and I noticed a big boost for the entire team. So I’m very grateful for this and it’s also, I think, a boost for the field of tumour immunology and acknowledging the importance of that.
Ido: It’s a wonderful recognition for the entire group. Science is not a individual sort of capacity, but actually really the ability to bring together the idea of a group of people and perhaps an entire field, right? That shares information, shares technologies, and is able to really bring together all of this knowledge to something that, at the end, improves human health. And I think this recognition shows that we are maybe on the right path to making some important breakthrough in this very exciting field.
Alexandra: Marta, you are the 2025 winner of the Rising Star Award. So congratulations. The Rising Star Award is offered by the EACR, Mark Foundation and Pezcoller Foundation annually to an EACR member with an unfunded score A cancer related project from the 2024 ERC Starting Grant Calls. Would you like to tell us what does this award means to you?
Marta: Absolutely. So first of all, thank you so much for the award. It’s an incredible privilege and honour to receive it and based on the candidacy for the award, I can only imagine what the competition was like. So it’s just really motivating, I would say, and also as a brand new junior group leader, this transition is filled with some levels of self doubt and uncertainty. So to receive this kind of validation is incredibly encouraging and really exciting. There’s of course disappointment that comes with not receiving an unfunded A from the ERC. So it’s just a really exciting opportunity for myself and for the team to get to delve into the work and some of these really burning questions. So thank you so much.
Alexandra: Having such an impact on your research field and workplace requires passion and dedication. So I’d like to ask you, how did you find and define your research interests. What drew you into cancer research in the first place and specifically to your area of research?
Ido: So I would say, you know, the attraction to the field is really that this is a very significant problem of society, right? Cancer is still an unsolved problem, which affects the life of almost 30% of the society. It’s a huge problem and that is I think first and foremost what attracted me and the entire group to work on this area.
I believe that the immune system is the long term answer to fight cancer. And I think what the immunology community has done over the last 10-15 years, with checkpoint blockade and CAR-T therapy, is really showing that there is a huge potential to, not only delay the disease, but really cure it.
The other part that we recognise that we don’t understand well enough the immune system and especially all of the different approaches that the tumour is using to overcome the immune system. There has been great push in understanding the one specific subset of cells, the T cells, but there are many other immune cells which are involved in there. And we thought using new technologies, which there is really a huge revolution in a single cell genomics field, CRISPR, and being able to use this with the new computational approaches, AI and so on, will bring new ideas, new hypotheses that will allow us to test new treatments. And we’re very excited and also very optimistic that it’s going to bring really exciting breakthroughs in the coming years.
Karin: I can actually echo a bit what Ido is saying. In particular the societal burden, right? One out of three people develop cancer. One out of seven women develop breast cancer. And that’s my research area. Already as a PhD student, I worked in the field of tumour immunology, but it was way before tumour immunology started to change clinical practice.
And actually back then it was not so much appreciated by the cancer field that immunology may be an answer to cancer. There was a lot of focus on the driver mutations or oncogenes and to have seen this whole field evolving and now saving lives by activating the immune system of patients. It’s incredibly rewarding but also a testimony to the importance of fundamental research.
Without fundamental research into immunology, how do those immune checkpoint molecules work? Actually sometimes research that doesn’t come from the cancer field, but much more from autoimmune fields or for immunology, that we are now saving lives. To have worked in that field is very inspiring. In the end, in my lab, we collaborate also closely with clinicians. I work in a cancer center so every day I see cancer patients when I enter my work. That’s the biggest motivation to do this research. And I think it’s very fascinating how the immune system works. How does a tumour escape from immune control?
Well, our immune system is so effectively protecting us against viruses and bacteria. And to understand these, basically the tricks that tumours have to escape from the immune system, trying to understand at the mechanistic level, we feel that that may open up novel forms of immunotherapy. That’s very motivating. To do fundamental research, but knowing that it’s relatively easy now to take the step to the clinic, because we’re treating now cancer patients with immunotherapy. That’s very rewarding and inspiring.
Alexandra: Thanks Karin. I’d like to ask Marta as well. Your work is related mostly to cell plasticity and ageing in cancer. What drew your attention to this area?
Marta: Absolutely. So just to echo the previous responses, almost nobody in Western society is unscathed from cancer. And that’s no exception in my own family either. And just the level of societal burden and the capacity that we actually have, through studying molecular biology, to make an impact. So really, as Karin said, going from basic, basic science all the way to translational discoveries, I think is the most motivating and really what drew me to cancer biology in general.
And with regards to our specific research field. The concept for me of cell plasticity is amazing. It’s something a little bit novel, but at the end, it’s actually not that novel. It’s kind of understanding you know this foreign self, right, how we’re co opting these developmental biology programs and reactivating them in maladaptive ways. [00:09:00] And I think that that’s an absolutely fascinating field.
And related to that, we’re starting to learn that there is some sort of reason to the madness of ageing, and ageing of course being the single greatest risk factor for developing cancer and many other diseases. So just trying to understand the interplay of what’s happening at the cellular and organismal level that’s facilitating this. And is there actually a rational way that we can interfere with some of these processes? That’s really fascinating to me. And I think kind of a new frontier that we’re just scratching the surface of.
Alexandra: Thanks, Marta. It’s really nice to hear the connection that you and Karin made between curiosity-driven research and clinical practice because we at the EACR are also committed to highlighting the importance of curiosity driven research in cancer research.
And we do that under the #KeepResearchCurious hashtag.
Moving on to my next question, I wanted to ask what would you say are the major changes you noticed in the cancer research field since you started working in it?
Marta: My answer here is going to echo a little bit what Ido and Karin already touched on. Technology has dramatically changed. I’ve been in the cancer biology field not very long, less than 15 years probably since I started my undergraduate degree. But when I was undergraduate or PhD student, you know, people were having like single author papers, you know, the grad student and the P. I. And now there’s been this amazing technological revolution in terms of sequencing, translational methods, biophysical methods, all these confluence of diverse fields that we’re starting to integrate.
It’s nearly impossible now to have this super impactful paper that doesn’t draw on these various themes and so I’ve seen even in my short time as a cancer researcher, the fields become much more integrated and that necessitates a lot more collaboration. And really a lot more interdisciplinarity and trust with your collaborators, because they study things that you have no hopes of understanding, you know. It’s impossible to be fully versed in immunology at the same time as molecular biology, at the same time as biophysics. And so we start to rely on each other and to integrate a lot more. And I think that that’s actually what makes this space and time and evolution of cancer biology very exciting.
Karin: Yeah, I, can completely agree with Marta that these technologies are really exploding and offering a lot of new opportunities. I also have to say that I see more and more descriptive science, whereas I feel sometimes it’s just the start of a hypothesis and we still need to go for the full blown mechanistic, functional studies to really tease apart, okay what do we observe if these new technologies? Is it cause or consequence? And how are they connected and how do they functionally contribute to cancer formation or dissemination or therapy resistance? So it also puts a lot of responsibilities on people using these complex technologies. Like what’s the next step?
I think also looking at my own field, and I already mentioned it a little bit earlier, I think there’s now much more integration of cancer biology and immunology. As before, these were kind of separate topics, and tumour immunologies were much more connected to immunologies in other fields. Now you see tumour immunologies way more interacting with cancer geneticists, but also with clinicians.
I think, in particular, the bridge of fundamental research to the clinic has become much easier to take. I think it’s very exciting times. Sometimes the clinical trials go faster than what we can do in the lab, which can be a threat, but also opens opportunities that as fundamental scientists, we can have much easier access to patient samples.
And we can actually do reverse translation and learn from what we observe in patients. Why do some not respond to immunotherapy and others do? And can we then learn from the patients whether there are certain immune cell populations or features of the cancer? And can we bring those back to the lab and then study those at the functional level?
So I think it has opened a lot of different additional layers of interactions and expertises that come together.
Ido: Definitely, I think the mentioning of technology and the need to collaborate and basically to master many different disciplines is very critical. But I actually think the principles haven’t changed. It’s all about curiosity-driven science. It’s all about being optimistic in the way that makes you take risks. It’s all about being very focused on what is the important questions. And those aspects are much more important than any technology. In the past, the ancients, with a single southern blot, identified oncogenes and made a very critical discovery that has pushed cancer biology.
And we have so much more capacity to measure many different types of information from the cell. But if we’re not focused on what are the questions, and how do we drive them to make better diagnostics, a better treatment, then we’re not going to make new discoveries.
And I think that remains the same. It’s about the people. It’s about the curiosity. It’s about innovation and it doesn’t matter which technology you’re using.
Alexandra: So my next question builds a bit on this. How did life as a researcher change in your experience?
Ido: I think we’re more connected globally. You’re connected 24/7 now, basically, right? There is a different part of the world that is awake at every point of time. And through the collaborations there is sort of endless information and influence that you both receive and also transmit and I think it’s actually becoming more important to maintain this global connection to share information. To have these very important joint meetings where every country in the world is participating in and their scientists are contributing and it influences them. And I think if we do not have this, I think the pace of discovery will slow down. And I think this amazing pace that we’re in, which would be very fruitful I believe in the coming years. I expect to see many new treatments coming. I think it will only happen if we continue this collaborative spirit and the ability to share information and work together toward this common goal.
Marta: Just expanding a little bit on Ido’s comment about the abundance of information that exists. I have to confess that this has been a challenge. I mean there’s so much research going on, so much communication, so much data being generated, because also going back to what Karin said earlier, people are doing a lot of descriptive data generation and it’s like, it feels sometimes, you know, overwhelming to keep up with it all.
And so then you feel a lot like there’s a million interesting things going on and you want to know about all of them, but it’s simply impossible. So I think that that’s a challenge. Understanding how to stay somewhat aware of everything that’s happening, but at the same time, really focusing on the details of what you’re doing and trying to ask the questions that you’re capable of answering. So that’s definitely been a huge change in my brief career as a cancer biologist, relatively speaking.
Karin: Way more information comes to us, which is really an enrichment, but also a threat. I think as a scientist, you need to stay creative and focused. So sometimes you have to close yourself off to all the information and this fear of missing out is sometimes difficult to balance. But yeah, the power of collaboration, I think that is fantastic. It used to be a little bit more individual research, whereas now it’s much nicer to collaborate and to share forces. All the things that have changed, but I think from my field, it’s indeed appreciation for tumour immunology, which was not there 20-25 years ago. Not at all. And I think that it shows that, in the end, the data science will tell us where to go, right?
And if this is true, immunology is really proved to be very powerful to use the immune system against cancer. And it’s very exciting to see so many scientists from all different fields now feeding in to this topic of tumour immunology. And I think that’s very exciting.
Alexandra: Now I’d like to maybe somewhat reverse the question, if I may. In your experience, how do you think your own contributions and work will influence or further influence the development, of your research field in the future?
Karin: I think where we really contribute is, there’s a lot of interest in the tumour itself, the tumour microenvironment, and now more and more it becomes clear, and I think we also contributed to that, is that primary tumours also have quite profound systemic effects on the immune system.
And this can impact metastasis formation, but also therapy response. But what we also see is that thus far, many of the immune therapies are given one size fits all. And especially with breast cancer, we see that only a relatively low proportion of patients benefit from immune checkpoint blockades.
And what our research, and also from many others point out too, is that we should not use this one-size-fits-all approach. We need to understand why has one breast cancer patient got a lot of T cells in the tumour and other breast cancer patients, same age, same type of tumour, has a very different immune landscape.
What is really emerging that cancer cell intrinsic processes really steer this immune landscape. So what are the genetic drivers? What are the epigenetics or the metabolic demands of these cancers that really dictates how this tumour communicates with the immune system? I think that really stresses to build bridges even more with cancer geneticists, or people that are into metabolomics, to really understand this interpatient heterogeneity in the tumour microenvironment, whether this is immune system and it is a stroma components. But really to help us in the next decades to more and more go towards more personalised immune intervention strategies.
And I hope that my lab can play a role by trying to mechanistically study what are then the determinants of a cancer that dictates whether there will be many T cells or more neutrophils or more myeloid cells. And how then does this tumour manage to escape immune control. And not only locally, but also systemically, how does this tumour talk to the bone marrow to make more neutrophils, or to alter the education of these cells?
Because I think with immunotherapy it’s basically a very new therapy. There’s still many ways to improve this also with novel ways to manipulate the immune system. My dream is to contribute to novel forms of more effective immunomodulation in cancer.
Alexandra: Just to build up a bit on your response, what would you say is your favourite, most interesting research topic project that you’re working on at the moment?
Karin: I love all the projects in the lab. I think a longstanding line is how the genetic makeup of breast cancer shapes the immune landscape and immunotherapy response. I think there we look at different PH3 kinase alterations but also P53 alterations. But we also have a very exciting research line on eosinophils, which have been overlooked in the cancer fields for a very, very long time.
But based on observation in patients and then in our mouse models, they observed that these eosinophils are actually very importantly contributing to immunotherapy response. Very unexpected, because normally most myeloid cells play a negative role. And it’s so nice to now have a myeloid immune cell subset that is beneficial.
So I cannot give you one answer because all the projects we work on are close to my heart, but these are the things I’m very excited about.
Alexandra: Could you share with us maybe one exciting recent development in your research that you’re planning on sharing with us as part of your lecture at the Congress?
Karin: Yeah, I think that this has to do with if you have mammory tumours. Breast tumours that have in the same gene a mutation, PIK3CA. But the mutation is at a different location, different hotspot mutation, that you can get a completely different immune environment. One of the mutations gives an environment that’s much more rich of macrophages that are highly immunosuppressive. Whereas the other mutation gives a similar type of breast tumour, but that tumour contains not so many macrophages, but way more regulatory T cells. Something that we had not expected that a different hotspot mutation in the same gene would give such a different outcome in how the immune system looks like in that tumour, but also then how the tumour responds to immunomodulatory strategies.
I think that’s one of the things we’re very excited about. Not published yet, but we’re trying to find out how it works and can we use this as a way to move towards more personalised immune intervention studies.
Alexandra: Sounds fascinating, and I can’t wait to hear more about it during your award lecture at the EACR Congress.
I’ll redirect the conversation now towards Marta. So Marta, how do you think your work will influence the development of your research field in the future?
Marta: Yeah, so I think that what we’re really interested in is kind of non genetic drivers of cancer, right. And so I think that the fact that we’re at this crossroads here, this sort of paradigm shift comes again from technological advancements because we used to kind of perceive just cancer as a stepwise accumulation of mutations, right? And then you get old enough, you have enough mutations in the right cell and you get a cancer.
But sequencing technologies, you know, a lot of work from the Sanger Institute and many other places. We have a lot of oncogenic mutations just sitting in our body and actually they very, very rarely progress to cancer. And so I really hope that our group will contribute to some of that paradigm shifting biology and trying to understand really what are the mechanisms that are not necessarily encoded within the sequence of the DNA, but that actually permit the emergence of these cancers from these preexisting mutations, or accumulated mutations, in our body and very excited for the challenge and the journey and to see what we can contribute.
Alexandra: And would you be able to pick a favourite project that you’re working on?
Marta: So all of the projects in my lab are very nascent. The members of my lab have been here for about three to six months maximum. So everything is really just getting started. And I think that conceptually I’m excited about all of them. We’ll see, you know, which are the most fruitful and which developed the most but, hearkening back to something I mentioned before is this relationship between the co option of developmental or physiologic programs. So, for example, in the context of cell plasticity, we now know that in a normal injury response, there’s a lot of plasticity that happens in cells actually do differentiate on purpose. And they acquire a lot of these phenotypes that we traditionally associate with cancer cells. And so I’m very excited to try to dissect those two things and try to understand if there’s really a fundamental difference in a fundamental mechanism of control between adaptive and maladaptive cell plasticity. And so I think that the projects related in the conceptual kind of path are the most exciting for me right now.
Alexandra: And would you be able to give us a bit of a teaser about your award lecture at the Congress?
Marta: Sure, just touching back on that topic again, this kind of like maladaptive versus adaptive cell plasticity. I think we have exciting mouse models where we can lineage trace cells that have induced this physiologic type of cell plasticity.
And so now we’re in a position to start asking questions about what happens with them in the long term, what sort of epigenetic memory they may have instilled. And what their contribution directly to tumour genesis actually is and whether we can manipulate that. So we’ll see how far ahead we get in terms of the data and experiments and how much I can share, but those are kind of the concepts that I’m looking forward to presenting.
Alexandra: Thank you. Ido, how do you think that your work will influence the development of cancer research in the future?
Ido: I think it already impacted cancer research today. You know, when I started the lab 15 years ago, we knew cancer is extremely heterogeneous, but we didn’t have the tool set to actually understand it, or at least measure it. And what we’ve been doing during these years to develop the technologies that allow us to actually understand what is the exact phenotype of immune cells in the tumour? How do different treatments modify it? Some do better, some worse. And this technology revolution I think really influenced every sort of area in cancer biology and especially cancer immunology and, you know, just came back from the AACR meeting in L.A. There wasn’t a single presentation that hasn’t used single cell biology to study their new immunotherapy or their new concept. So I think it already made a huge impact.
But I think we’re just starting to see the fruits of this impact because it’s not fully applied across every area of cancer biology and cancer immunology. I think the more we’ll start measuring clinical trials and combine single cell genomics with it, the more we’ll test in animal models using single cell biology, the more we’ll understand the fundamentals of how the tumour overcomes the immune system, the difference between patients that are responding or not responding to certain checkpoints or CAR T. And the ways to fundamentally improve it through understanding of new immune pathways and checkpoints and through new mechanisms that the tumour is using to overcome the immune system. So I think we’re in a revolution, but we’re just in the beginning of this revolution.
Alexandra: And with this focus on technology and single cell technology in particular, your work spans several research fields from cancer immunology that you’ve mentioned to neurobiology, metabolism and autoimmune disorders.
I’d like to direct the same question to you as well. If you could pick one project that you could say is your favourite that you have worked on over the years?
Ido: It’s like to pick your favourite son, right. It’s impossible, like there’s no such thing. But definitely there are ones that are more exciting or I believe would have very significant impact on future immunotherapy I think. Targeting the myeloid cells is very, very critical. I think we’ve done quite significant advances in activating T cells in tumours. I don’t think we have done as much or even closely as much in the myeloid compartment. And this is the area we’re putting a lot of effort because of the complexity of actually targeting the myeloid compartment there. Dendritic cells, macrophages. I think that will bring the biggest delta of impact. I think that’s the missing piece. And the thought that if you just target a single sort of immune lineage and you get complete responses.
I hope the appetite for that is reduced to the attempt to continue on this path and find more and more T cell checkpoints. The added value was, I think, not as anticipated. Whereas I think the combination with other immune pathways and especially other immune subsets, I think is going to be much more synergistic.
Specifically in the talk that I’m going to present, I’m going to show something that is really, really exciting to us. A work that’s been uncovered in the last seven years, in developing a checkpoint for tumour macrophages. And how we came up with a new version that doesn’t only block the suppressive pathways of tumour macrophages, but also very robustly activates T cells and NK cells in the tumour. And responses at least in many clinical models is just amazing and I’m very excited about this direction. So this is what I’m going to share at the EACR Congress.
Alexandra: Karin, I’d like to take the conversation about developing the research field a bit beyond the science. So I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit on what in your opinion is most valuable to create a cordial environment for women in research?
Karin: Very nice question. I think it’s very powerful to work with a diverse team. Actually a little bit regardless of gender, but a lot of diversity, right? Where are people trained, from which country do they come from? And yes, also their gender also plays a role, I think. And I cannot generalise, right? Every person, whether it’s man or female, some are more collaborative, others are more stronger when they work on themselves. But I think it’s really the power of having all these different qualities.
And I think, especially for me, I have a warm heart for parents, people with children in science, because I’ve experienced myself that you go through, you know, when you get children. I have myself two amazing children that are now 10 and 13, but that does put certain stress on your career.
And for me, it has been extremely helpful to then see other, in my case women, that are amazing scientists that also have a family. And I think I really learned that, as a scientist, you have to work very, very hard, but it’s so important that you build in moments that you’re not spending time on science, but do something else, because that’s when you’re most creative. And I really appreciate having a family that you have those moments that you can just wind down, let the science a little bit behind you do something else. But meanwhile, your brain is still miraculously working on maybe some of the challenges that you encounter in your lab.
I have to say we have a lot of babies in my lab, quite some postdocs, but also PhD students. And well to make sure that I can feel with them that sometimes it’s hard, you have less sleep. It’s not so easy, but yeah, also to hopefully be an example showing that you can combine. It’s the best of both worlds. You know, work in amazing science, have a great team, but also be able to have children and family.
So I think that’s one of the things that I really cherish. I’ve also been in a lot of recruitment committees and I hope by bringing in my expertise that it has contributed to making sure that there’s diversity in the candidates that we invite. And I think science is the place where there’s, you know, room for a lot of people with many different backgrounds. And I think that is what makes science so beautiful. And that’s what I hope to facilitate in my team, but also beyond my team.
Alexandra: Thank you, Karin, for highlighting the importance of diversity in science beyond gender diversity and for your very welcoming approach to family-oriented researchers. I’m sure that’s much appreciated in your lab and work environment. Ido, Marta, is there anything that you would like to add on this subject?
Marta: Sure, absolutely. From my end, I would just love to echo the comments on diversity. I mean, I’ve had the privilege of always training in incredibly diverse labs and big cities that also are very diverse environments. And I’ve seen, just as Karin said, how different people from different trainings, different backgrounds, different mindsets, different upbringings really, really enrich the environment and make the lab an incredibly productive place. And in my short time, I have seen women, especially in higher positions in biology, really increasing. So that’s been really encouraging. I think representation is one of the most important things because when I was an undergraduate student, I had maybe two women who are PIs to look to for examples, you know, and it’s tough to see yourself in the future, you know, to project that.
And yeah, just other thing is talking about this diversity and the fact that we’re challenged as scientists, sometimes obliged to move, and moving geographically has been incredibly enriching for my own career. But I do think that that poses unique challenges and starting a family.
And so from the perspective of support, I think that one of the things we should strive for in the future is for institutions to offer on site daycare services because when you come from across an ocean and you have absolutely nobody to help you with a family, no matter how dedicated you are to having both things, sometimes it becomes a little bit impossible. So I think that that’s something that we can work towards together as a community.
Ido: I think Karin and Marta described it really well and it’s a fact when you have built an environment when everybody can speak out and everybody’s voices are heard and equal. And you bring a diverse team coming from different backgrounds, different disciplines, then magic happens, right?
Then you don’t think monotonically, you think about new ideas. And science is about that, about really having this optimistic view that we can change the world. And I think we must maintain this view. Especially now when there is an attack on science from politics and other aspects, which I think are disastrous.
And I think more than ever we must continue the younger generation to have this optimism about science and how we can shed light over the world and really bring for equality and better life for everyone on the globe. And think we have an amazing generation of new scientists and we must bring them the torch as we have got, that science was appreciated and respected and that this is a profession that does good for the world and will solve the next decades of problems. And I think we have this amazing set of trainees all over the world.
When you go to conferences, you see that and we need to make sure that we bring them the same fortunate sort of atmosphere that we have had in terms of funding and resources and everything else. So it’s not going to be an easy task, but we are going to definitely make sure that this will stay. This very passionate environment to solve the biggest problems in health and to do it in a way that really everyone takes part of it.
Alexandra: I’d like to thank all three of you for sharing your perspective on how we could improve cancer research and what we expect from cancer research, both from a scientific perspective but also to keep it as a welcoming, inclusive community and further develop it in this way. I’ve got only one question left and for this I’d like to redirect the conversation a bit towards the EACR Congress and I’d like to ask each one of you for one thing that you’re looking forward to at the EACR Congress in June.
Marta: Just really looking forward to feeling inspired. I think that a Congress like this that goes from the very basic all the way to the purely translational studies is the perfect field for inspiration. And I’m sure that I’m going to come away with a lot of new ideas and connections and just emotion and pride for being a cancer biologist.
Karin: Yeah, I agree. I think last year, at the EACR Congress in Rotterdam, I really enjoyed the roundtable discussions that I had with early career scientists. And this meeting I will be involved in also an interactive session. I’ve really been staying in contact with some of these early career scientists. We’ve been emailing and it was very inspirational to be in contact with them, but also poster sessions to really talk to the scientists that did the actual experiments and to see, yeah, what’s coming up, the newest scientific results and data, and it’s really an amazing meeting the EACR Annual Congress. Especially I think this year also the award ceremony.
Ido: Yeah, I think it’s definitely very important to learn, be inspired and receive feedback on our work. I think this is the yearly celebration of the achievement of European cancer research and I think it’s very important, sort of what is the future vision that we want to aspire for and how do we make sure that this fantastic research that is happening right now in the European community is maintaining its excitement and prosperity in the next 10 years. It’s a celebration on one hand and how do we keep the momentum on the other hand that I think is very important to do as a community.
Alexandra: Thank you, Ido, and thanks all of you for giving me this opportunity to have this inspiring chat with you. Thank you so much for taking the time, I truly appreciate it and I’m looking forward to meeting you at the Congress in June.
Marta: Likewise. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
Ido: Looking forward. Thanks.
Karin: Looking forward to see you in Lisbon.
Alexandra: If you’d like to have the opportunity to learn more about our award winners and meet them in person, join us on 16-19 June 2025 in Lisbon for the EACR Annual Congress. Register before 27 May to get the opportunity to hear the latest from, and network with, top researchers from various fields of cancer research.
Ido, Marta, Karin, and our postdoctoral fellowship winners will be joined by the EACR Board members and keynote speakers such as Charlie Swanton, Elaine White, Cedric Blanpain, Dana Pe’er, Yardena Samuels, Carlos Caldas, alongside many other esteemed researchers. This year the EACR Congress will cover a breadth of topics from both fundamental and translational research with examples of clinical developments.
Topics discussed will include cancer immunology and immunotherapy, cancer genomics, multiomics and spatial biology, cancer metabolism, cancer neurobiology, RNA biology and DNA repair, just to name a few. It will cover aspects of cancer genesis and progression, cancer prevention, early detection, therapy response and resistance.
More information about the programme and invited speakers can be found here.
Enjoyed it? Stay curious with The Cancer Researcher Podcast. Subscribe now via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music/Audible, Deezer or YouTube so you’ll never miss an episode. You can find all episodes and their transcripts here.
Suggest a topic for a future episode: What would you love to learn more about? Click here to give us your topic suggestions in a short online form. We warmly welcome your ideas and input!
