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Newsletter 02/08
Dear Colleagues and Friends, a new year has begun and we are very close to our annual general meeting, to be held in Valencia next week. This represents an extremely important opportunity as it will once again allow us to evaluate the achievements of the past year all together, as well as develop new collaborations. On entering the last two years of life of the Network, it is also important to start thinking about our future. Last week I had the chance to take part at the General Assembly of our brother network, Conticanet, where we discussed the need to develop a vision of the future of sarcoma networks in Europe. A general agreement, endorsed by the European Commission, exists on the importance of integrating our two organizations. Some joint activities have already been planned and Conticanet has eventually accepted our proposal to cosponsor an Open Access Journal. In addition, at the end of the year, two consensus conferences on treatment and diagnosis of Soft Tissue Sarcomas and Bone Sarcomas will be held in collaboration with the European Society of Medical Oncology. Many other ideas are under development and, of course, any contribution is more than welcome. Needless to say, the many activities in which EuroBoNet is currently involved represent a paradigm of successful integration of both human and technological resources and everyone in the network deserves to be congratulated. Hoping to see most of you in Valencia, I wish to all a successful 2009. Angelo Paolo Dei Tos
IMPORTANT NOTICE
As of 1 December 2008 Jan van de Loo has taken over project management from Elengo Manoussaki as coordinator of the EuroBoNeT consortium.

Report from the EuroBoNeT RL2 meeting in Oslo
The EuroBoNeT RL2 meeting this year was held the 9th–11th of June in Oslo. Thirty people representing 11 EuroBoNeT partners were gathered to present the recent achievements and discuss the future plans. RL2 deals with osteogenic tumours and related sarcomas, and the meeting was opened with a talk by Clinic Head Sigbjørn Smeland (Norwegian Radium Hospital) on the importance of EuroBoNeT for the biological research ambitions of EURAMOS1, which is the biggest and fastest recruiting osteosarcoma treatment protocol ever. This was followed by reports from the three WP leaders on the progress, plans and challenges of the projects within the WPs. New proposed projects have been prioritised based on their potential for improved networking and integration. The genomic projects were then presented, and these aim to characterise large inter-institutional panels of clinical samples and establish a collection of tools and resources for preclinical studies. A large panel of osteosarcoma patient samples have been collected and exchanged between the institutions, and is being profiled for mRNA expression and DNA copy number changes. In addition, tumour panels of Langerhans cell histiocytosis, primary malignant vascular tumours of bone, chordomas, fibrosarcomas and malignant fibrous histiocytomas have been analysed in different aspects.	One important resource is the collected panel of osteosarcoma cell lines, which are currently being characterised in more detail than is possible for patient samples, including properties like drug resistance, microRNA expression and DNA methylation, as well as other in vitro phenotypes. These cell lines will serve as preclinical models based on their similarities with the clinically relevant profiles from patient samples. One important aim is to integrate the different types of data in order to identify correlations, and the data analysis and integration were discussed. The International Cancer Genome Consortium (https://www.icgc.org/) was presented by Dr. Adrienne M. Flanagan (University College, London). ICGC aims to obtain a comprehensive description of the genomic, transcriptomic and epigenomic changes in 50 different tumour types, and it has been proposed to include osteosarcomas as one of them. EuroBoNeT was invited to contribute with osteosarcoma samples to this study, although the sample sizes required will be a challenge for this tumour type. On the last day, different research reports were presented. This included characterisation of osteosarcomas in terms of signal transduction pathways, invasiveness, pathway regulation of the EGFR receptor, interactions with the immune system, presence of stem-like cells and gene expression profiling, as well as the characterisation of primary malignant vascular tumours of bone.



Report on RL3 Meeting Budapest October 3-4, 2008
EuroBoNet members met at Semmelweis Hospital in Budapest to present data and discuss progress in RL3. Some of the highlights included: identification of new markers of osteoclast precursor cells (eg CD33) in giant cell tumour of bone (GCTB); identification of the role of hypoxia in the pathobiology of GCTB; analysis of the role of EGFR and matrix molecules (eg tenascin C) in aggressive/metastatic GCTB; analysis of ploidy and telomeres in primary, recurrent and metastatic GCTB. RANKL and M-CSF-independent mechanisms of osteoclast formation were shown to play a role in GCTB and in Paget’s disease where further analysis of the p62 mutation shows that it has a role in the expression of factors regulating osteoclastogenesis. Another highlight was the development of a chorio-allantoic membrane-based technique for growing bone tumours, including GCTB. The RL3 group is performing well with frequent sharing of tissue and technical resources, increasing staff exchange and generation of interesting data/expertise; this activity is likely to provide long-term benefits to bone tumour pathology research and diagnosis in Europe.

FWO awards the Oswald vander Veken Prize of 25,000 EUR
Every three years, the Flemish FWO foundation (Foundation for Scientific Research) awards the Oswald VANDER VEKEN Prize for an original and/or in-depth study on the knowledge of musculoskeletal tumours, their ethiology, prevention, diagnosis and/or treatment. The prize is 25,000 EUR and is reserved for researchers who live and work in a member state of the European Union. This year, the prize was awarded to: Pancras Hogendoorn Ph.D. in pathology (NL) Professor of pathology at Leiden University and Network coordinator of EuroBoNeT (NL) For his work on: “Molecular tumour pathology of tumours of the musculoskeletal system esp. cartilaginous tumours.” Musculoskeletal tumours in general are rare, however among them cartilaginous tumours as a group are the most frequent. As a result of their relative rarity and complex clinicoradiological presentation and pathological and molecular make up, unraveling their nature has been challenging. Dr. Hogendoorn and his research group have focused over the past years on diagnostics and molecular understanding of these tumours aiming at finding potential treatment options. With regard to diagnostics the emphasis was on closely correlating conventional as well as dynamic MRI findings to histopathology leading to an optimal set of diagnostic criteria, while on the (immuno)histological level criteria were put forward separating benign- from malignant tumours. Using an array of molecular techniques the genetic make up of these tumours were studied which led to the identification of the causitive (tumour supressor) role and mechanism of the EXT genes in hereditary and none heriditary osteochondromas and the identification of the cascade of downstream targets of the EXT pathway in osteochondroma, chondrosarcoma, chondroblastoma amd chondromyxoid fibroma. Finally a syndrome was identified involving breast cancer and cartilaginous tumours. His group at Leiden University Medical Center at present leads a European network of excellence focusing on pathology and genetics of bone tumours (www.eurobonet.eu).

Boerhaave-course on Practical clinical, radiological and pathological diagnosis of skeletal tumours
Participants of the Boerhaave-course on Practical clinical, radiological and pathological diagnosis of skeletal tumours, from 17-19 November 2008 in Leiden, The Netherlands.



EuroBoNeT Forum
In attachment with this email comes a pdf containing instructions on how to access the EuroBoNeT Forum. In addition, you can browse the online version of the HowTo, located at https://www.eurobonet.eu/forum_howto.htm