Annual Meeting Program Committee Chairs Keith T. Flaherty, MD, FAACR, and Christina Curtis, PhD, MSc, share a few highlights from today’s schedule to help you plan your day.

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Welcome to the third day of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024. It’s Monday and the meeting is in full force—the San Diego Convention Center is buzzing with energy and excitement.

The plenary session starts the day off at 8 a.m. PT—make your way to Hall GH for Profiling Tumor Ecosystems in Native Tissue Context and hear from four experts on topics such as spatial encoding of immune response, intratumoral microbes, and 3D spatial profiling.

The Annual Meeting has a record number of submitted abstracts this year, so don’t miss some of the amazing science being presented in the poster sessions. Poster presentations start at 9 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. PT today, with a wide range of cancer research represented. Browse today’s sessions in the online planner to find topics of interest.

For a closer look at novel therapies in cancer research, don’t miss the clinical trials plenary, Advances in Targeted Therapy, which starts at 10:15  a.m. PT, and the clinical trials minisymposium, Advances in Immunotherapy, at 2:30 p.m. PT. Immunotherapy is also the topic of the Presidential Select Symposium—the session will look at immune checkpoint blockades, cancer vaccines, CRISPR, and CD4 T cells. Get to Hall GH at 10:15 a.m. and find a seat.

Public policy is an important part of our research; policy decisions affect the direction and success of everything from laboratory goals to public health. The AACR’s Regulatory Science and Policy track addresses many of those topics, and today’s session at 10:15 a.m. PT in Room 5 looks at tobacco reduction as well as the Cancer Moonshot initiative. Brian King, PhD, MPH, director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products, will share the FDA’s priorities for reducing tobacco-related illness and death.

W. Kimryn Rathmell, MD, PhD, will take the stage for the NCI Director’s Address and Fireside Chat at 2:15 p.m. PT in Ballroom 6 A. Rathmell and AACR President Philip D. Greenberg, MD, FAACR, will chat after her remarks. 

A major symposium you don’t want to miss will be the session Targeting Aberrant Transcription in Pediatric Cancer at 12:30 p.m. PT in Room 33. Presentations will cover topics such as exploring approaches for identifying aberrant transcriptional events, generating accurate tumor models faithfully recapitulating the developmental context where the tumors arise, and addressing challenges and opportunities in designing drugs for these targets.

Other sessions of note in today’s lineup:

• The AACR-JCA Joint Session, Novel Molecular Drivers of Gastroesophageal Cancers and Evolving Biomarker Driven Therapies, and the AACR-ASCO Joint Session, Strategies for Detecting Minimal Residual Disease (MRD) and How to Apply It in the Clinic;
• Six award lectures, including the AACR-Margaret Foti Award for Leadership and Extraordinary Achievements in Cancer Research with recipient Chi Van Dang, MD, PhD, FAACR.
• Meet-the-Expert Sessions starting at 5 p.m. PT, featuring Lillian L. Siu, MD, FAACR; Jennifer Rubin Grandis, MD; Sangeeta N. Bhatia, MD, PhD, FAACR; Kenneth C. Anderson, MD, PhD (hc), FAACR; and Gerrit A. Meijer, MD, PhD;
• Four forums this evening beginning at 5 p.m. PT and a special session, The Nature of Cancer: Lessons Learned from Tumors with Simple Genome, which offers insights now emerging from the study of childhood and simple-genome cancers; and
• Four Town Hall meetings, including the Minorities in Cancer Research Town Hall at 5:30 p.m. PT in Grand Hall B at the Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego.

Enjoy today’s science, and don’t forget to get your tickets to Tuesday night’s Cancer Research Night with the San Diego Padres!