On 10 and 11 January, Oncode and CGC researchers met at the Compagnie Theater in Amsterdam to enjoy, discuss and experience science. Apart from inspiring talks, the two-day event also offered other engaging ways to stimulate interaction: a science booth market place, parallel sessions on topics like research funding and personal development, the official launch of the community platform and a session centered around patient engagement. Learning more about each other’s research and getting to know the community was key during this scientific meeting.

Sharing new scientific insights
The seven recently recruited junior Oncode Investigators were given the opportunity to tell the community about their science. They all gave interesting talks about their lab, available technologies and the goal of their research. Other presentations were given by junior researchers.

Science booth marketplace
This year, the Oncode team initiated a new programme element: a market place for science booths. The goal was to give research groups the possibility to present their work in a creative way and connect with the rest of the community. Collaboration between scientists is crucial for Oncode and CGC to succeed and the marketplace was an excellent opportunity to facilitate that. 23 research booths were set up and all groups really made an effort to show what their research was about in a fun, engaging way. The Chien lab (headed by Miao-Ping Chien, both a CGC and Oncode member) won the prize for best booth.

What we can learn from the patients we serve
This year’s meeting focused on different angles of cancer research. Patient engagement is one of them, but not always an obvious topic for fundamental researchers. Jacco van Rheenen gave an inspiring presentation about his personal view on patient engagement. After that, it was time for an interview with Harrie Berkers, a scleroderma patient, and Arjan van Caam, Postdoc at Radboudumc. They told the audience about their involvement in the STAP-project, which helps to stimulate patient participation in research and aims at facilitating interaction between patients and researchers. Finally, Lisanne Spaander, a young cancer patient, told her personal story and performed beautiful songs that described her experience of treatment and recovery.

Launch of the community platform
Within Oncode, researchers are strongly encouraged to work together because we need all available talent to outsmart cancer and impact patient’s lives. Group leaders usually have a large network to tap in to, but for PhD-students, postdocs or junior researchers it is not as easy to find expertise outside their institutions. To address this problem, Oncode invited researchers to co-create an online community platform to help people find the expertise, knowledge and equipment they need: in- and outside their own institutions.

Marten Hornsveld, (postdoc at LUMC) is a member of the co-creation group and presented the new platform to the research community: “For scientists, collaboration is at the core of getting exciting ambitious scientific ideas into reality. But finding the right collaborators and state-of-the-art tools to make it work within the foggy mazes of institutional websites is just a pain. This community platform will breach the walls of our single institutes, as connecting with the right people, tools, equipment, funding and events required to spark your project will become easy, fast and boundaryless!”

The community platform is now live and all Oncode researchers have been invited to fill in their profiles and start connecting with each other.

We hope to see you all at one of our next events!