2025 Cancer Cachexia Conference: Cachexia management today and potential treatments for tomorrow

This proposal requests partial support for the 2025 Cancer Cachexia Conference (CCC). The conference will be organized by the Cancer Cachexia Society (CCS), and hosted in Turin, Italy from September 25-27, 2025. Cachexia is present in a significant number of patients at their time of cancer diagnosis and ultimately affects approximately 75% of patients with advanced disease of any tumor type. Cachexia decreases physical function, functional independence, and quality of life - causing considerable patient and family distress. Cachexia also predisposes patients to illness, increases treatment toxicity, reduces treatment efficacy, and decreases survival, with cachexia estimated to be causative in 30% of cancer deaths. Though emerging evidence suggests this number may be much higher. The overall goals of the conference are to foster awareness, understanding, and research of cancer cachexia among scientists at all career stages, clinicians, patients, and caregivers, for the purpose of advancing identification, current management, and future treatment, for this major unmet medical need. The CCC serves as the major conference to help grow this awareness and research around cancer cachexia and remains the only conference devoted solely to this topic. Indeed, other cachexia-related conferences cover a broad array of topics including aging, sepsis, covid, chronic kidney disease, obesity therapy, cardiovascular disease, burn injury, critical illness myopathy, as well as cancer. Importantly, although there has been previous iteration of the CCC, each conference is unique in focusing on new topics within the rapidly evolving cancer cachexia field. In this regard, the 2025 CCC will include several new sessions and speakers and cover topics within the scope of the Division of Cancer Biology’s scientific branches, including a double session on how the tumor microenvironment, tumor metastasis, and immunology impact cachexia, an expanded session on integrated and systems biology (inter-tissue crosstalk) and cachexia, as well as new sessions on central regulation systems of feeding and metabolism in cachexia, and emerging topics including pediatric cancer cachexia. The 2025 CCC will also include a dedicated session on current management strategies for cachectic cancer patients that will be recorded and made publicly available. These novel sessions and topics will be covered whilst simultaneously providing speaking opportunities, training and mentorship for graduate students, postdoctoral associates, physicians in training and early-stage investigators. The impact of this 2025 Cancer Cachexia Conference will be to promote new progress and growth in the clinical investigation of anti- cachexia therapies and to strengthen education and research in cancer cachexia.