SPOKANE, Wash. — Leland H. Hartwell, Ph.D., just named a recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Medicine, will deliver a keynote address at the Third Inland Northwest Cancer Conference to be held Nov. 2-3 at the DoubleTree Hotel Spokane City Center.
Gary Meadows, director of Washington State University’s Cancer Prevention and Research Center and an organizer of the conference, said, “Dr. Hartwell’s significant research is particularly relevant to clinical practice and the goals of our conference: to bridge the gap between bench research and bedside practice.”
Clinical sessions target primary care and internal medicine practitioners as well as surgeons and oncologists. Presentations address application of oncologic principles of prevention, screening, diagnosis and treatment of the cancer patient.
Specific research sessions include a mini-symposium on diet, nutrition, cancer and the application of genomics and proteomic methodologies to the development of new diagnostic and treatment approaches for cancer.
Hartwell is president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and professor of genetics at University of Washington in Seattle. Hartwell’s work on cell division in yeast, along with that of the two other recipients — Timothy Hunt and Paul Nurse of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in England — identified key regulators of cell division and the way chromosomes are duplicated in the process. These discoveries are vital to understanding how genetic defects originate in cancer cells. Hartwell will speak on natural genetic variation and common disease.
Featured speakers in addition to Hartwell include Brian Druker, M.D., Oregon Health Science University; Fred Appelbaum, M.D., Fred Hutchinson Research Center; Michael Keating, M.D., of the M.D. Anderson Medical Center; and Janet Rowley, M.D., University of Chicago. Druker, a professor of medicine, conducted the clinical trial on STI 571, the latest drug for leukemia.
More than 200 family physicians, researchers, oncologists, primary care physicians, internists, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, related health care, outreach providers and graduate students from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia and Alberta are expected to attend.
The conference is sponsored by Washington State University Cancer Prevention & Research Center, Providence Services of Eastern Washington, Deaconess Medical Center/Valley Hospital and Medical Center, and the Spokane County Medical Society. Registration rates are available at Web site: http://capps.wsu.edu/programs/cancer01.htm.
