Associate Professor Amanda McCann elected IACR President

Associate Professor Amanda McCann, UCD School of Medicine and Fellow, UCD Conway Institute is the newly elected President of the Irish Association of Cancer Research (IACR) and began her term of office at the 2017 IACR conference of the IACR, which took place in Kilkenny from 22 - 24 February. She takes over from UCD colleague and Conway Fellow, Professor William Watson.

The annual meeting of the community of cancer researchers in Ireland included oral and poster presentations of new findings from across the country. Conway researchers were successful in a number of the categories.

Dr Melinda Halasz (Kolch group, Systems Biology Ireland) won the Best Proffered Paper 1 Session for her work on Identification of spliceosomal components as novel therapeutic targets for the therapy of children with high risk MYCN-amplified neuroblastome.

Bo Li (Gallagher group) won the Best Proffered Paper 2 Session for his work on High CDK7 is linked to poor outcome in triple-negative breast cancer and is a rational therapeutic target. 

Dr Maria Prencipe won the European Association of Cancer Research (EACR) Young Investigator award for her research on Serum Response Factor as a novel targeted therapy for castrate-resistant prostate cancer. 

Despite the emergence of next-generation anti-androgens, castrate-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) remains challenging to treat. Androgen receptor (AR) is still the main target and key player of resistance. Dr Prencipe hopes that new insights into the mechanisms of AR interaction with co-factors and co-regulators will identify new therapeutic approaches that are not susceptible to AR resistance mechanisms.

Along with colleagues, she has identified SRF as a transcription factor relevant to CRPC both in vitro and in vivo. Due to SRF cross-talk with AR, its inhibition in combination with current anti-androgens represents a promising therapeutic approach. 

‌Pictured: Dr Maria Prencipe (3rd from left) is presented with her EACR award. Newly elected IACR President, Associate Professor Amanda McCann