32° virtual Pezcoller Symposium

AGING AND CANCER

Co-Organizers: Alberto Bardelli, Fabrizio D’Adda di Fagagna, Giannino Del Sal, David Livingston, Massimo Loda, Stefano Piccolo, Maria Rescigno


Focus and Goals:

Aging is a particularly prominent and effective promoter of human cancer development, but how it operates in this regard is largely unclear. Thus, given its particularly prominent role in clinical cancer development, the prime objective of the 2021 Pezcoller Symposium is to illuminate and decipher the nature of those key molecular and biological pathways that allow aging to associate with human cancer development. Importantly, while the abnormal phenotypic outcomes of this complex process are numerous, the detailed nature of the molecular mechanisms that readily connect them to carcinogenesis remains largely opaque.

For example, accumulating genomic damage, along with other age-related biological forces, are widely believed to be major components of this complex clinical process.  However, how these age-related outcomes are so commonly translated into clinical cancer development invites ever more cogent molecular explanation. In the forthcoming Symposium a range of insights into the aging vs tumorigenesis paradigm will be considered. Moreover, research findings extending from basic to clinical science will be presented and discussed.

The objective of this meeting is to evaluate, critically, the latest evidence that links components of the aging process to cancer development and to clarify, where possible, how these forces accelerate tumorigenesis.