编者按: 2016年6月12日,第21届欧洲血液协会(EHA)年会在丹麦首都哥本哈根完美落幕。据悉,本届EHA年会的现场参会人数达到14240人,共收录2500余篇血液疾病相关的最新研究,创下新的大会记录。本刊记者在会议现场荣幸地邀请到EHA主席、英国剑桥大学Tony Green教授进行独家访谈。Green教授首先对本届EHA年会的亮点内容进行了回顾,随后作为骨髓增殖性肿瘤(MPN)分子机制研究领域的先行者,Green教授介绍了他们在MPN领域所取得的主要研究成果和最新进展。
——欧洲血液协会主席、英国剑桥大学Tony Green教授访谈
本届EHA年会亮点回顾
大会主席:非常荣幸接受你们的采访。大会的日程安排非常丰富,有关大会的亮点内容有:首先,在10日的开幕式上,瑞典卡罗琳斯卡医学院E Hellstr?m Lindberg教授被授予José Carreras奖,以表彰他对血液学疾病领域做出的巨大贡献,随后Lindberg教授做了关于“Towards understanding the anemia of myelodysplastic syndromes”的主旨报告;其次, 在主席推荐环节,我们公布了本届EHA年会的6项最佳研究,并邀请其作者依次做了精彩汇报,他们无愧为全球一流的学者;最后,本届大会关于免疫治疗的专题会议也是一大亮点,在该领域取得了巨大进展,让人兴奋不已,相信未来,免疫治疗将在整个血液肿瘤领域发挥出重要作用。
Prof. Green: My pleasure, and thank you for inviting me. The program is very broad, so it’s a bit difficult to pick one thing that is really special. But I would certainly recommend that people pay attention to the opening ceremony, which is spectacular and is followed by one of our award-winning speakers, Dr. E Hellstr?m Lindberg. The Presidential Session, with the best abstracts, is another highlight, and the plenary sessions—we’ve invited speakers from all around the world, the very best world-leading authorities—that would be another highlight for me. And perhaps, lastly, if I were to very unfairly choose one topic that is exciting a lot of people here this year, that would be immunotherapy. There is a lot of excitement about the recent advances and how the immune system can be used to treat a whole variety of hematological cancers.
免疫治疗是目前肿瘤研究领域最热的话题之一。在本届EHA年会上,我们设置了两项有关专题,分别是免疫治疗的教育课程和研究进展,尤其是在教育课程中,集中了几乎所有血液学家所感兴趣的话题。在最新的研究进展方面,我们今年共收录了2500个研究报告,也是迄今为止最多的一年,涉及基础研究、临床试验以及转化医学研究。
Immunotherapy is probably one of the hottest topics around, but I would re-emphasize that this meeting has two main pillars: education and research. The educational program provides updates on a very broad variety of topics that will be of interest to all hematologists. And then on the research side, there is a vast amount of new research. This year we have 2,500 abstracts, which is the biggest we have ever had before, and these cover everything from basic research to more translational disease-focused research and clinical trials. So, there’s something for everybody.
JAK/STAT 信号转导通路在骨髓增殖性肿瘤(MPN)方面的转化应用
大会主席:MPN是我一直非常感兴趣的研究领域。它是一种表现为白血病的前驱症状,并可能向急性髓系白血病(AML)进展的恶性血液性疾病。我们在MPN领域主要有两项重大贡献:首先,是有关MPN全基因组表达谱的研究,它首次揭示了绝大多数缺乏JAK2突变的患者,具有CALR基因的突变。这项研究成果已经转化应用于MPN的诊断当中;其次,我们在去年通过研究发现,体细胞突变的顺序在肿瘤的发生发展过程中具有非常重要的影响。举例说来,若A突变先于B突变,其结果与B突变先于A突变有很大差异。这种情况不仅出现在MPN,我们的研究首次表明这是在所有肿瘤中共有的现象。这对于靶向治疗具有重要意义,仅具有基因突变可能还不够,我们还需要了解突变发生的顺序。
Prof. Green: Thank you very much. So, yes, I have a long standing interest in this area of myeloproliferative neoplasms. These are preleukemic disorders and they can go on to acute myeloid leukemia. I guess if you’re asking for a couple of recent highlights, I would pick two. Those would be our description of the genomic landscape of the myeloproliferativeneoplasms, which revealed for the first time that most patients that lack a JAK2mutationin fact have, instead, mutations in a gene that was not previously understood to be mutated in any cancer—and this is the calreticulin gene (or CALR). So that was a very exciting and novel finding that is alreadytranslated into new diagnostic approaches for these patients. And the second, I think, would be our finding last year that the order in which somatic mutations occur is very important for the way a tumor develops. So if mutation A comes before mutation B, the disease that the patient develops is different from that which develops if mutation B comes before mutation A. So the order makes a difference. And that’s a new finding not just for our disease(myeloproliferative neoplasms), it’s the first time it’s being recognized in any cancer. And I think will prove to be true of many different cancers. This has many major implications, I think, for how we think about targeted therapy. Just having the mutation may not be enough. We may need to know in what order a mutation has occurred.
EHA未来发展方向
大会主席:未来,EHA将继续强调教育专题,与全球的血液学专家、血液学协会持续、良好地互动。明年的EHA年会,我们将围绕“基础、转化、临床”研究为主题,因为只有将三者有机结合、互相促进,我们的患者才能获得更好的治疗。没有研究,就没有进步;没有研究,也就无所谓教育。因此,在下一届EHA年会上,我们将会议的主题定为:Research at the Heart of Hematology。
Prof. Green: So we will continue to have a major emphasis on education. We will continue to interact with hematologists and hematology societies around the world. But I guess a particular focus for the next year will be research—basic, translational, and clinical—because we believe that research is really the engine that drives all improvements in patient care. Without research, there will be no improvements and without research, there is nothing to educate people about. So we want to place our focus for the next year on research and, in fact, our theme of the year will be Research at the Heart of Hematology.