Introduction: The 2008 European Society for Medical Oncology International Symposium on Sarcomas and Gastrointestinal Stromal TumorsDisclosure

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In this edition of Seminars in Oncology, we attempt to summarize the findings of the Second European Society for Medial Oncology International Symposium on Sarcomas and Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumors, held in Milan, Italy on May 13 and 14, 2008. This symposium was set up by Paolo Casali to take place every other year to bring together experts in biology, translational research, and the treatment of human connective tissue cancers (sarcomas) and related tumors to integrate their findings into proposals for future research and therapy on these rare diseases. The other such regular meeting is the annual Connective Tissue Oncology Society meeting (www.ctos.org). The meeting organizers this year included Dr Casali as well as Jean-Yves Blay from Lyon, France, and Paolo Dei Tos from Treviso, Italy.

Sarcomas are by their nature diverse, since they can arise from any connective tissue in the body, and in humans include as many as 100 different entities. They span the range in age from infancy to geriatric populations, and they are one of the few human tumors outside hematologic malignancies where one can find a large percentage of tumors with specific defining genetic events such as mutations (eg, KIT in gastrointestinal stromal tumor [GIST]) or specific chromosomal translocations (eg, t(11;22) with its characteristic EWSR1-FLI1 fusion gene in Ewing sarcoma). As a result there is both a tremendous variety in the biological underpinnings as well as the clinical presentation of these tumors, which provides a number of potential inroads to the biology and therapy of other cancers. For example, many prostate cancers are found to have an ETS family member in a translocation, similar to the genes that cause Ewing sarcoma, suggesting overlapping potential avenues for therapy.

As Guest Editors, we have tried to sort through the many interesting talks and comments from this meeting to serve as a touchstone for further research in sarcoma biology and therapy. We hope these condensed presentations provide a good starting point for investigators interested in sarcoma research, and also provide a group of new and ongoing problems that will need addressing in the next few years. We hope that by the next meeting in 2010 there will be even more progress observed than in this past 2-year period, the time of some of the most rapid advances in many of the subjects discussed herein.