MIB Agents OsteoBites and osTEAo

Matteo Trucco, MD joins us on OsteoBites to provide a preview of the FACTOR 2024 scientific panels in layperson terms with a brief overview of vocabulary and terms as a helpful resource for patients and families attending our FACTOR 2024 conference.Dr. Matteo Trucco is a pediatric oncologist caring for children, teens and young adults with sarcomas at Cleveland Clinic Children’s. He also serves as Clinical Director, directs the Children’s Cancer Innovative Therapy Program and co-chairs the National Pediatric Cancer Foundation’s Sunshine Project consortium where he and colleagues develop and conduct clinical trials seeking more effective and less toxic treatments for childhood cancers. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Medical Degree from Temple University School of Medicine, and completed his Pediatrics Residency at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital and his Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Fellowship at Johns Hopkins and the National Cancer Institute. He is honored to be on the MIB Agents Board of Directors, chairs the MIB Agents Scientific Advisory Board, and co-chairs the organizing committee for the annual FACTOR Conference. He also has the privilege of moderating the MIB Agents Tumor Review Board for Osteosarcoma

Dr. Amy LeBlanc is a board-certified veterinary oncologist, Senior Scientist and Director of the CCR Comparative Oncology Program at the National Cancer Institute, NIH. In this position, she directly oversees and manages the operations of the Comparative Oncology Trials Consortium (COTC), which designs and executes clinical trials of new cancer therapies in tumor-bearing pet dogs. She joins us on OsteoBites to discuss findings as we work toward genomic and transcriptional profiling of canine osteosarcoma and how the results relate to human osteosarcoma. The DOG2 project was launched to better understand the relationships between the disease in dogs and humans -- all to make it better for all patients, be they 2-legged or 4 legged!

Sibylle Mittnacht, PhD discusses the current landscape of PARP inhibitor use in cancers and osteosarcoma and discusses preclinical evidence and translation of biomarker-driven use of therapeutics in osteosarcoma. Dr. Mittnacht heads the laboratory of Cancer Cell Signalling at the University College London (UCL) Cancer Institute, with a long-standing interest in concepts that drive tumour development and therapy response in cancer. She acts as the cancer expert for the Royal College of Radiologists and is a founding member of the FOSTER (Fight Osteosarcoma Through European Research) initiative, where she co-leads the cell model and drug response focus groups and is a participant in a newly established initiative, icure, which aims to establish a living biobank and therapeutics assessment pipeline for rare and ultrarare cancers.Work in the Mittnacht team centers on understanding how cell cycle checkpoint aberrations affect the behaviour of cancer cells and the identification of therapeutic opportunity that arises therefrom. The team uses functional genomics and chemical biology to discover new treatment paradigms with a current focus on unmet needs in sarcoma and breast cancer, and is involved in establishing patient-derived and tissue-mimetic preclinical cancer models for these cancers, in order to accelerate therapeutic discovery.