International Symposium
October 7-8, 2026

09:00

09:10

Nadine Gaisa (UcarE, Ulm)
Bladder cancer: the beauty and the beast

09:30

Christian Gratzke (UcarE, Freiburg)
Systemic treatment of bladder cancer

09:50

Peter Black (Vancouver)
The next frontier in neoadjuvant therapy: Personalizing EV + Pembrolizumab through biomarkers and resistance biology

10:20

Melanie Boerries (UcarE, Freiburg)
From data to biological insight: empowering researchers to explore bladder cancer omics datasets

10:40

Coffee Break

11:00

Jarno Drost (Utrecht)
Unraveling childhood tumorigenesis using organoid technology

11:30

Michael Shen (New York)
Investigating luminal-basal plasticity using patient-derived bladder tumor organoids

12:00

Clementine Le Magnen (Basel)
A patient-derived organoid platform for integrative molecular and functional profiling of aggressive bladder cancer

12:30

Sofia Vlasova (UcarE, Freiburg)
Modelling of bladder cancer complexity: A mouse organoid biobank integrating epigenetic and oncogenic drivers

12:45

Lunch Break and Poster Session

14:00

Simon Baker (York)
What can normal human tissue models of the urothelium teach us about bladder cancer initiation?

14:30

Antonella Catalano (UcarE, Freiburg)
Identification of epigenetic therapeutic vulnerabilities in bladder cancer

14:45

Ezgi Özyerli Göknar (UcarE, Freiburg)
Deciphering the role of UTX/UTY and MLL3/MLL4 complexes in urothelial carcinoma

15:00

Christoph Plass (Heidelberg)
Deletions in AML and single-cell epigenetic heterogeneity as drivers of therapy resistance

15:30

Ian Frew (UcarE, Freiburg)
X and Y chromosome epigenetic tumour suppressor genes in clear cell renal cell carcinoma

15:50

Coffee Break

16:10

Michal Schweiger (Cologne)
Next (epi-)genomics in cancer: Non-coding sequences and their functional impact

16:40

Marc Timmers (UcarE, Freiburg)
Epigenetic control by KMT2C, KMT2D, UTX and ARID1A in bladder cancer models

18:30

Speaker´s Dinner

08:30

Keynote Lecture by Ali Shilatifard (Chicago)
The long and short of it: 30 years of transcriptional elongation control and epigenetics as a fundamental driver of development and complex human diseases

09:30

Nicola Iovino (Freiburg)
A cross-species genetic screen identifies MLL3/MLL4 as regulators of oocyte assembly and female fertility

10:00

Dan Levy (Be’er-Sheva)
Lysine methylation signaling at chromatin

10:30

Coffee Break

11:00

Yu Chen (New York)
Epigenetic mechanisms of urothelial field cancerization

11:30

Cathy Mendelsohn (New York)
Nuclear receptors as drivers and inhibitors of urothelial carcinoma

12:00

Isabelle Bernard-Pierrot (Paris)
Modeling FGFR3-driven bladder tumorigenesis in vivo

12:30

Lunch Break and Poster Session

13:30

Jian Jin (New York)
New inhibitors, degraders and stabilizers of epigenetic targets and new approaches to target undruggable proteins

14:00

Stefan Knapp (Frankfurt)
Targeting reader domains of the epigenetic acetyl-lysine code

14:30

Manfred Jung (Freiburg)
Chemical epigenetics: inhibitors of methyl lysine binding proteins

15:00

Markus Eckstein (Erlangen)
Spatially organized immune phenotypes and immunotherapy resistance in bladder cancer

15:30

Coffee Break

15:50

Tugba Bagci Önder (Istanbul)
Systematic interrogation of chromatin modifiers driving drug resistance in cancer via CRISPR-based functional genomic screening

16:20

Eric Metzger (UcarE, Freiburg)
Identification of novel actionable targets in muscle-invasive bladder cancer

16:40

Michèle Hoffmann (UcarE, Düsseldorf)
Augmenting treatment efficacy in urothelial cancer cells by epigenetic inhibitors

17:00

Adjourn – Ian Frew (UcarE, Freiburg)