A sunny Sunday morning in Seattle was too good to waste! So we went for a good old fashioned ‘brunch‘ and a walk along the water front! Some interesting peices of ‘art’ was to be viewed at the Olympic Sculture Park, for example this one:
Not to be out done the street art near Pike Place market was equally as interesting!!
But I digress, back to the conference!
It was poster day for GBG post doc Dr Karan Shah, a first timer at #ASBMR 
The afternoon was pretty much devoted to Bone and Tumour interactions with some really good selected oral presentations including one from Lyon about the role of Lysl Oxidase(LOX) in colon cancer metastasis to bone. Their data adds to the increasing eveidence, including from my lab which we published earlier this year in Nature, that LOX plays an important role in bone metastasis and could be an effcetive biomarker and or therapeutic target.
The Greg Mundy Memorial Session was also dedicated to skeletal neoplasia with an interesting plenary from Brenda Lee on Osteosarcoma – very apt given that it is #BoneCancerAwarenessWeek 2015 in the UK! This was followed by Tumour stromal interactions in breast cancer metastasis by Kang from Princeton – which again highlighted the importance of miRNAs. My old boss Peter Croucher closed the session talking about tumour bone microenvironment interactions and lessons learnt from multiple myeloma. Whilst some multitasking was done by myself and others during the session it reminded me of the time I gave my first selected talk at an international conference. I was very nervous but extremely excited when I saw Greg Mundy in the second row “Great, I can impress him with my work’ I thought …but was soon disappointed when I saw that he was sleeping! How wrong I was – wasn’t he the first person to get up once I had finished and ask me a very pertinent, and nice, question! Just because someone has their eyes closed (or indeed checking Facebook !) doesn’t mean they not listening!! 👍
DrG
The Gartland Lab 