Cancer-Related Vascular Biology

Understanding vascular biology important for knowledge of cancer processes

Thorough understanding of general and cancer-related vascular biology is regarded important to understand processes like cancer growth, sustainability and progression, and is suggested to be a relevant target for therapy in various diseases. Through this new three-week course set up as part of the CCBIO/Harvard INTPART partnership between the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children's Hospital and CCBIO, the students will meet researchers who have been in the frontline of vascular biology research for decades.

Some of the topics that will be covered: Basics of vascular biology; vascular biology related therapeutic approaches; biomarkers in vascular biology – from discovery to clinical application; lymphangiogenesis and vascular biology in non-cancerous diseases. Program for each course week will be announced prior to each date.

Harvard collaboration       

The Harvard experts will join us to give lectures and lead discussions. Among others, Bruce Zetter, Marsha Moses, Randy Watnick, Michael Rogers and Diane Bielenberg will participate. Attending this course is a unique possibility to meet and discuss vascular biology with international experts.

Course dates:

• Course week 1: September 17-21 2018. 
• Course week 2: October 1-5 2018
• Course week 3: Date not set, will be in February 2019.

Course week 1: 
Program is available here.

Course week 2: 
Program is available here.
Topics:  Vascular-related cancer biomarker discovery and validation, and the role of proteases in vascular biology related biomarkers.Lectures on vascular biology-related biomarkers, including methods and approaches for biomarker discovery, validation and commercialization work.  Topics related to the role of proteases in normal and disease associated vascularization and metalloproteinases (MMPs and ADAMs) as key regulators of tumor angiogenesis will be lectured. Program will be available closer to the course week.

Course week 3:
Topics: Lymphangiogenesis, physiological angiogenesis, and endogenous inhibitors of angiogenesis. Program will be available closer to the course week.

Open for all

The course is open for all interested, such as Master students (biomedicine), undergraduate students of the Medical Research Program, PhD students, postdocs, researchers and technicians. The course can take up to 25 participants. In case of a fully booked course, priority according to the INTPART funding will be given to undergraduates. 

Student assignments

Each course week is composed of some lectures, group discussions with the international faculty, weekly assignments and presentation of these, as well as time for self-studies, and is currently awaiting approval as a 10 ECTS course.  There are weekly assignments for the participating students, where the students go through seminal papers in vascular biology, and present these together with discussions on study design, alternative set-ups and follow-up studies.

Research seminars by the Harvard faculty are part of the course, and will be open to a broader audience. The open research seminar for the first week will be September 20th.

Requirements for PhD and master course credits are participation in 80% of activities in all course weeks (attendance list); participation in assignment groups and presentation of the assignments.

Registration:

Please use this registration form.

Deadline is September 14th 2018 at 12:00 (noon).

Contact persons:

Elisabeth Wik and Lars A. Akslen have the academic responsibility. Elisabeth Wik is course coordinator – Elisabeth.Wik@uib.no