The present and future of oncology

This year’s Gathering Around Cancer, which was the 13th iteration of the conference, brought together national and international expert physicians, researchers, patient advocates, industry and other stakeholders to learn from each other and address some of the hot topics in oncology.

The 2025 event included sessions on innovations in cancer care, as well as presentations dedicated to genitourinary and gastrointestinal cancers. As always, the organisers paid close attention to feedback from attendees and tailored the content of the conference to ensure the most impactful content.

The organising committee – which comprised Prof John McCaffrey, Prof David Gallagher, Dr Megan Greally, and Prof Roisin O’Cearbhaill – explained that the aim of the conference is to focus on the topics that change the way physicians approach the management of cancer.

The event also seeks to highlight the crucial interface between clinicians, scientists, allied disciplines and patients, with a particular emphasis on quality-of-life considerations.

One of the distinguished international speakers was Dr Ying Liu, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre (MSKCC), New York, US, who spoke on the topic of genetic testing and precision medicine in the context of oncology care. Dr Liu told the conference: “We have known for a long time, even before genetics, that there is a hereditary component to cancer, and a lot of this is derived from studying twins. We saw that if one twin had cancer, if you were an identical twin rather than a fraternal twin, you were at a higher risk of developing a second cancer.”

Dr Liu discussed the history of genetics and reviewed recommendations for genetic testing and cancer prevention, and presented a case study from a patient with ovarian cancer. Her talk also focused on how to incorporate genetic testing and novel technology into oncology care, and she discussed the link between BRCA1/2 and ovarian cancer, as well as Lynch syndrome and endometrial cancer.

There is a complex interplay between genes and the environment, she explained, and “we are not exactly sure how it works, but it leads to some kind of phenotype, and I have always been very interested in this concept”.

Dr Liu went on to discuss the Knudson ‘two-hit’ hypothesis. “This is the hypothesis that you need two ‘hits’ to develop cancer and, in those born with a germline mutation, they have one hit already. So they only need one more to develop cancer.”

The technology for genetic testing is continually improving, she told the conference, and the sophistication of the technology has evolved from initially just testing a single gene, to testing multiple genes, to whole-genome sequencing. This provides physicians and researchers with a lot of information, sometimes to the point where there is so much data that it becomes difficult to process, which is where technology comes into play.

Dr Liu provided a brief overview of her research and discussed the importance of precision medicine in targeted treatment, and how in MSKCC, genetic testing is sometimes tailored according to genetic ancestry and different ethnicities. “We are now using genetic testing to understand these tumours on a molecular level” to determine subtypes and to tailor targeted therapy, she said.