This meeting will be based on intense collaboration across disciplines in science and technology (specifically, medicine, surgery and biology), promoting further new attitudes and novel interactions between broad ranges of players in research. The instruments and next-generation sequencing techniques that will be used for the assessment of CDH1 germline mutation and genomic characterisation of gastric and breast cancers are really innovative, an evolution of genomic science, and will consent to generate a big amount of data with a single sequencing run. Furthermore, final results of the present meeting could be the basis for a deeper, more careful evaluation and potential improvement of the current established guidelines for submitting subjects to CDH1 genetic testing.

The Divisions of Cancer Prevention and Genetics and Surgical Senology at the European Institute of Oncology are dedicated to develop new strategies for cancer prevention and care by conducting several phase II and III clinical trials, including laboratory and clinical studies on surrogate endpoint biomarkers of carcinogenesis and polymorphisms in genes related to cancer predisposition risk factors.

In the past decades, several collaborations with international study groups, including the International Gastric Cancer Linkage Consortium, have been established. The personnel involved in this meeting consists of senologists for clinical management of the patients, geneticists for genetic counselling, lab investigators for the laboratory analyses, a bioinformatics for next generation sequencing data analysis, a pathologist for selection and genomic characterisation of gastric and breast cancers, and a senior statistician for the statistical analysis.