The opening weekend of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024 features two plenary sessions—Saturday afternoon, April 6, and Sunday morning, April 7—that kick off the Annual Meeting with diverse presentations on discovery science, novel therapies, and new technologies.

Plenary sessions continue Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings, with a wrap-up plenary session Wednesday afternoon that will review highlights from the meeting.

Take a closer look at the two weekend plenary sessions below, and refer to the Annual Meeting app and online program planner for the most up-to-date details:

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Discovery Science in Early Cancer Biology and Interception

Saturday, April 6, 4:15 – 6:15 p.m. PT
Hall GH, Ground Level, Convention Center

A panel of four accomplished researchers will present on a variety of topics related to tumor biology, genetics, clonal evolution, and interception. Daniel D. De Carvalho, PhD, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, is the plenary chair and will provide introductions and closing remarks.

• Margaret A. Goodell, PhD, FAACR, Baylor College of Medicine, will present on clonal hematopoiesis mechanisms and cancer risk.
• Kornelia Polyak, MD, PhD, FAACR, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, will discuss drivers of age-related increases in breast tumorigenesis.
• Don W. Cleveland, PhD, FAACR, University of California San Diego, will present on the evolution of genome instability in cancer.
• Michael B. Kastan, MD, PhD, FAACR, Duke Cancer Institute, will close with a presentation on DNA damage signaling pathways and how they are being used to develop new approaches to cancer treatment.

Program Committee Chair Christina Curtis, PhD, MSc, Stanford University, emphasized the importance of this area of science, and noted that fundamental biology provides the foundation for advancing new therapies and interventions, and ultimately to prevent malignancy.

“Detecting cancer at an early stage is critical to improving patient outcomes. With technological advances and increasingly sensitive tools, this is becoming a reality,” Curtis said. “But we really have to understand the underlying biology, including the transition from healthy tissue to malignancy if we want to intervene appropriately and optimally.”

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Opening Plenary Session: Inspiring Science, Fueling Progress, Revolutionizing Care

Sunday, April 7, 9:30 – 11:30 a.m. PT
Hall GH, Ground Level, Convention Center

The opening plenary welcomes a panel of four distinguished cancer scientists to present on topics in the vein of the theme of the Annual Meeting 2024: “Inspiring Science, Fueling Progress, Revolutionizing Care.” The AACR Program Committee Chairs, Curtis and Keith Flaherty, MD, FAACR, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, are chairs for this plenary and will provide introductions.

• Aviv Regev, PhD, FAACR, Genentech, will present on cell atlases and what that data could mean for new insights into cancer biology and novel therapeutics.
• Jakob Nikolas Kather, MD, MSc, Technical University Dresden, Germany, will discuss how artificial intelligence can derive biomarkers from routine pathology slides.
• Benjamin F. Cravatt, PhD, The Scripps Research Institute, will present on activity-based protein profiling and its use in discovering chemical probes and drug candidates for cancer-relevant proteins.
• Carolyn R. Bertozzi, PhD, FAACR, Stanford University, will discuss next-generation cancer therapies enabled by bioorthogonal chemistry.

“There’s a theme here that we were able to amplify in the opening session,” Flaherty said. “The technology curve has been getting steeper and the simultaneous application of multiple novel technologies to model systems and patient samples is accelerating the pace of progress. The work of the investigators in this session is exemplary of that.”