December 10-13, 2025
Doubletree by Hilton Montreal
Montreal, QC, Canada

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CONFERENCE COCHAIRS

Andrea Cercek, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York
Elizabeth M. Jaffee, Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, Baltimore, Maryland
Timothy R. Rebbeck, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts

The incidence of early-onset cancers, often defined as cancers that occur before age 50, has been steadily increasing in the past 50 years. This is in part due to improved screening and early detection methodologies that have led to increases in breast, thyroid, and prostate cancers, all of which also have a declining mortality rate. However, more alarming are the global increases in gastrointestinal cancers since the 1990s, particularly in adolescents and young adults, under the age of 40, the typical age at which most screening begins. This trend is thought to be due in part to increased risk factor exposures during the first 2 decades of life. However, even in utero exposures can lead to epigenetic reprogramming within developing cells resulting in life-long susceptibility to chronic diseases including cancers.

This rise in early-onset cancers is thought to be due to changing patterns of exposure in early life and includes changes in diet, lifestyles, increasing rates of obesity, environmentally mediated metabolism alterations, early exposure to carcinogenic viruses, changing reproduction factors, and changes in an individual’s microbiome. There is increasing data supporting the interplay of chronic exposures to risk factors with epigenetic reprogramming particularly within cells directly exposed to external factors such as the gastrointestinal tract.

The magnitude and speed at which early onset cancer incidence has increased is unlike most cancer trends ever observed (the possible exception being cigarette smoking and lung cancer). This phenomenon has been observed on all continents, in men and women, and in many cancer sites. These epidemiological observations could be as pivotal to cancer research as the discovery of the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. That landmark discovery revolutionized our understanding of cancer causes and mechanisms, leading to new prevention and screening methods. Similarly, the increase in early-onset cancer cases could signal a significant shift in cancer research.

This AACR Special Conference will discuss the causes of this increase in early onset cancers, including risk factors, detection, early life exposures, and other potentially modifiable factors that may be used to reverse these trends; current research on the mechanisms of early onset cancers, including likely culprits such as obesity and inflammation, as well as discovery of novel biological pathways for early cancer development; and areas of need in the translation of epidemiological and mechanistic observations to interventions.