DR. HALUSKA: You will notice on today's program there is not a whole lot of time for questions and discussion with regard to the individual presentations. That is because we want to do it tomorrow.

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So, here is the template. It is in your packet. It is in the back of the breakout session assignments. We put together a template for how we want to talk about things tomorrow in the breakout sessions.

What we would like to do is first of all start off thinking about what do we understand about the aspect of the field that you have been assigned.

For instance, if you are working on the targets that we now have in existence, how are you going to be thinking about these?

So, first of all, we are going to be charging the individual group with stating the main problem of the field as they see it, from their slice of it.

Then, state both the accepted body of consensus, as well as the areas of controversy. What do the participants in your group agree upon and what do they not agree upon and, given that, can you predict which directions we might be going in the future?

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Having identified what we understand, what stands in the way of further progress? I like to think there are at least three categories of things that might.

The first is a lack of biological understanding. What about the disease or the disease process, or some manifestation of it in the clinic, do we not know that we need to know to make progress.

What are the technical challenges that exist in coming to that understanding?
Thirdly, although we would like to stay away from issues of process, like tumor banking or grant funding or HIPAA regulations, think about what logistical aspects of implementing things into the clinic might stand in the way of achieving the understanding that we are looking to seek.

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List the solutions to the problems that you just posed. There are, again, two classes of solutions. We don't work in a basic science laboratory, and a lot of the experiments that we would like to do with human populations are not achievable but, in an ideal world, what clinical trials might you propose? What new agents would you like to see present? What new pathway would you like to be explored?

Then, what are the practical things that we could do that would lead to implementation of new therapies in the clinics?

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Finally, what we are going to ask is that ultimately you pose some recommendations for us. Dr. Sondak is going to talk in a little bit about some of our thinking about the structure of the program as well, but ultimately we are going to try to put these recommendations together, both for CTEP and the NCI, and maybe for publication, if it falls into the right format.

So, the final thing that we are going to be doing Wednesday morning is how each of the breakout sessions have answered these questions and what solutions they have listed in a general forum, where we can all discuss them.

So, that is my idea of what we are going to do. So, keep these things in mind today, as you go through the program.

Again, the speakers that you see before you are expert editorialists. They will tell you a little bit about the state of the field as it exists, think about the problems that exist, the potential solutions that we might see, and recommendations that we might come to. Thanks.

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DR. SONDAK: Today, as you have heard, it is about where we are right now, not how we got there, not what we argued about a few years ago, where we are right now.

Tomorrow morning are a series of more didactic reviews, and we will discuss at the end of the session today kind of how we think people should break themselves up for those modality sessions first thing in the morning.

Those are your choice to attend which one you want. We have some suggestions and then we begin the meat of the meeting, the breakout sessions that we are all looking forward to.

The other unique feature of today's program is that at the end of each of the four sessions we will have two speakers.

They are labeled pro and con. I like to think of them as the optimist view and the pessimist view. Their job is not to comment on each individual talk that you have just heard, but to really set the stage of where are the controversies, where are the arguments, where are the problems, for the breakout sessions beginning tomorrow morning.

So, without any further ado, we will get our first speaker up here, Dr. Tucker. I am not even going to take the time to introduce people individually and list all their accolades. They are all too numerous to list anyway. Dr. Tucker is going to speak about predisposition genetics.

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