Welcome

Dear Colleagues,

dear Members of the German Cancer Society,

We invite you to join us for the 22nd International AEK Cancer Congress from March 5 to 7, 2025 at the Langenbeck Venue in Berlin.

The AEK Cancer Congress hosts around 500 participants. It is funded by the German Cancer Society and the German Cancer Aid and will be held in 2025 under the theme Understanding and targeting metastatic cancer”. You will see that we have assembled a great line-up of outstanding speakers, who will cover multiple exciting topics of current biology, from basic mechanism to multi-omics approaches and new molecular and immune-therapies to overcome metastatic cancer disease.

Sessions will cover cellular and molecular mechanisms of metastasis, the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms of tumor cell reprogramming during the metastatic journey, and the crossroads of cancer metastasis, metabolic reprogramming and therapy resistance. We will highlight the contribution of innovative tools such as spatial transcriptomics and multi-scale data driven concepts of metastatic evolution and emergence of resistance mechanisms. From the clinical perspective the development and application of liquid biopsy and new multi-model targeting approaches, including immunotherapy, will take center stage to overcome metastatic disease.

The meeting is intended to be a forum at which all participants can discuss their science and we encourage everybody to present their most exciting science. A major highlight of the meeting are the discussions at the posters and we will make a lot of time find appropriate formats to foster this. The AEK conference has a tradition of presenting particularly unpublished work at the forefront of cancer science. We will select a significant number of talks from the abstracts and provide students, postdocs and junior faculty the chance to present their latest research. In addition, the best posters will be presented as “Flash Talks”. Posters will be highlighted by expert poster walks and a poster award. We particularly encourage students and postdocs to attend the conference and therefore offer special registration rates. In addition, there will be travel bursaries for young investigators.

We believe that the meeting will be an exciting venue to discuss science in person and bring cancer research to the next level. We are very much looking forward to welcome you at the 22nd AEK Cancer Congress in 2025 in Berlin!

With very best wishes,

Thomas Brabletz, Peter Friedl, Uta E. Höpken, Christoph Klein

Congress Chairs