Infection, cancer and prevention: report of the 19th International Symposium of the Foundation for Promotion of Cancer Research.

Professor Takashi Sugimura (National Cancer Center, Tokyo) opened the symposium with a welcome address and a review of previous symposia (1,2). The Foundation for Promotion of Cancer Research has held this International Symposium annually since 1987, as one of the activities of the first 10-year strategy for its cancer control program, and has continued through the second and third terms of the strategy. From the first to the 18th symposium, the total number of invited speakers was 578: 307 from Japan, 183 from the USA, 17 from the UK, 14 from France and 57 from 17 other nations. For this year’s symposium, the Foundation invited 10 speakers from abroad and 24 from Japan (Fig. 1). Professor Sugimura stated his personal interest in this year’s topic and emphasized that the content of the program was divided into three main topics: infectious route, cancer mechanism and prevention. Next, the international chairman Professor Martin Blaser (New York University) after welcoming all attendees summarized the microbes implicated in the causation of human cancers. During his talk, Professor Blazer reported that cancers could be due to the loss of indigenous microbes, and summarized the mechanisms by which their loss could enhance disease risk: direct effects on host cell physiology, loss of suppression of other endogenous organisms and ease of colonization by acquired organisms.