Natural products provide diverse resources in the development of new drugs for cancer treatment and prevention. Cancer chemoprevention is defined as an approach for the prevention, delay, or reversal of carcinogenesis. To discover and develop new cancer chemo preventive agents, many natural product researchers and medicinal chemists have focused on the exploration of plants with biological activity in bioassays designed to detect potential cancer preventive agents and the isolation of natural products as lead molecules, as well as modification of the active components for further synthesis. Recent advances in the chemistry of novel bioactive natural products provide improvement and development of new drugs. For the purpose of prevention of complex diseases such as cancer, there have been tremendous efforts of diverse groups of scientists working together to develop new and safe drugs from naturally-occurring resources. In order to review recent progress in this area and help to define a path to the future, we have assembled a group of internationally renowned experts in cancer prevention to participate in a symposium and present their recent work. Principal topics of the session will be potential chemopreventive agents developed from natural products and medicinal plants. The meeting will cover preclinical, clinical and epidemiological data in the area of cancer prevention research with compounds, either naturally occurring or derived from natural products components. There will be ten invited speakers for the session. Further discussion on the future direction of natural product research in the area of cancer prevention will be of great interest. At the start of the symposium, a lecture will be presented to overview the lectures to come, highlight the challenges of the field, and set the stage for the proceedings to come. The objective of the session is to critically evaluate progress and begin to chart of course for future work. Each lecture will include questions and answers and discussion. At the end of the session, a round table discussion will be moderated that will include each of the speakers and the audience. The symposium will be conducted as part of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Phytochemical Society of North America that will be held during the period of December 10-14, 2011, on the Kohala Coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. We will employ all of the resources assembled by the meeting organizers to assure the success of this symposium. The audience will be diverse and international. The venue is centrally located to facilitate East/West interaction. Very favorable hotel rates have been secured to promote broad attendance including graduate students and other trainees. It is expected the attendees will reflect broad diversity. The proceedings of the symposium will be published by Springer in their renowned series entitled Topics in Current Chemistry (impact factor 5.270;2009). Each chapter as well as the preface will acknowledge presentation at the meeting and support provided by the NIH. This will be a landmark achievement in the field of cancer chemoprevention.
Prevention of cancer is a safe and effective way to reduce human suffering. In principle, cancer chemoprevention could play a role as dominant as vaccines in the prevention of disease. Nonetheless, despite the great promise of this approach, progress has been hampered. We propose to organize a meeting that will bring outstanding researchers from both cancer prevention and natural products research field together. The objective is to increase communication, disseminate new findings, prepare a platform for increased collaborations in the use and development of novel components and their derivatives from natural products as potential cancer preventive agents, and to explore and define barriers and ways to overcome these barriers. A prevention approach with natural products is an important part of cancer prevention strategies for improving general public health. We believe that the conference may contribute to achieving the goal of the NIH, and will provide a better understanding and approaches to reduce cancer incidence and mortality in the coming decades.
