Chiara Maura Ciniselli, Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, and Dieta Brandsma, Netherlands Cancer Institute, were two of them.
A retrospective.

How did you come into contact with TRYTRAC?
Both Chiara and Dieta were invited to participate in the program through Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori and the AVL Academy of the Netherlands Cancer Institute respectively.

What appealed to you?
Chiara en Dieta appreciated the possibility to connect different researchers from different countries and with different professional background in order to improve their interactions. Dieta initially thought her work was too clinical because the majority of the participants appeared to be working pre clinically. But the interaction was interesting and fun.

What kind of research do you do in daily life?
Chiara is a biostatistician; I support the researchers in their different activity from study design and implementation to the statistical analysis of the data. Dieta is principal investigator on various clinical phase I-II studies in glioma an biomarkerstudies on CSF in leptomeningeal and brain metastases.

Did you talk about that research at TRYTRAC?
Chiara reported some results of her research obtained within European and national projects. Dieta liked to share information about research that only she is doing in this company. Also good to note that she is not the only researcher working in a niche, although it feels sometimes like that.

How does your work contribute to Cancer Core Europe?
Chiara hopes she provided some interesting inputs for the study design and planning as well as for data analysis. Dieta thinks that the exchange of preclinical and clinical techniques was interesting anyhow for everyone.

What have you learned?
Chiara  met different researchers with different expertise and learned one more time the importance of working into a multidisciplinary research community. Dieta has learned from mutually discussing ongoing research. And that she was able to convey specific points of clinical research to those who work mainly preclinical. That’s a bit of a different world. Nice to present in a different environment than a specific biomarker meeting.

What could have been better?
Chiara mentions that the meeting was suitable in relation to the current situation. In general, a good option could be to organize more specific workshops focused on topics of interest for CCE community. Dieta is curious how this kind of meetings will develop in time and will add to the goal of CCE. Both of them are looking forward to a new meeting.