YAP/TAZ and TEAD
At the Crossroads of Cancer
It all started when…
The CRAVAT Foundation teamed with the Eaton Foundation to fund an annual workshop at the Telluride Science Research Center (telluridescience.org) in Telluride, Colorado entitled, “YAP/TAZ and TEAD: At the crossroads of cancer”.
The Workshop
is small, topic-focused and brings together leading scientists in the field to share data and ideas on YAP/TAZ and their interaction with TEAD.
First organized in 2017
by Dr. Guy Weinberg and Dr. John Lamar, the goal of the meeting is to foster basic scientific study of YAP/TAZ and to bring leading minds into a field with direct applicability to treating EHE. The lure is the fact that YAP and TAZ are activated in a wide array of cancers so that the study of EHE, a ‘monogenic’ variant of this process, could lead to treatments of many common cancers….and as a byproduct, help EHE patients.
Success!
The workshop has been successful in bringing together the best scientists in this field, fostering productive collaborations, producing relevant publications and leading to funded research programs that can potentially inform and improve patient treatment.
Each year
up to 2020 scientists from Asia, Europe, Canada and the US have attended for a week-long presentation of data and open discussion of their research. Last year the COVID pandemic prevented an in-person meeting but two participants, Dr. Brian Rubin (Cleveland Clinic) and Dr. Ann Marie Pendergast (Duke University) each presented talks at a Webinar funded by the CRAVAT and Eaton Foundations. This year the workshop will be a ‘hybrid’ meeting with two-thirds of participants coming in person and the others attending on-line. As usual there will be attendees from all over the world including a mix of junior and senior faculty.
