Beyond the Paranoid Style - Fascism, Radical Right and the Myth of Conspiracy Fifth Convention of the International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies (comfas)

Following two years of online events, from the 14 to 16 September 2022 the fifth annual Convention of the International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies (COMFAS) took place in Florence. The title of the conference 'Beyond the Paranoid Style: Fascism, Radical Right and the Myth of Conspiracy' presented a framework for a wide variety of reflections that were both historically grounded and timely. After all, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, many scholars have had new experiences of the impact of conspiracy theory thinking. © 2022 Copyright 2022 by Paul Jackson.

Report of the 24th Meeting on Signal Transduction 2021.

The annual meeting "Signal Transduction-Receptors, Mediators and Genes" of the Signal Transduction Society (STS) is an interdisciplinary conference which is open to all scientists sharing a common interest in the elucidation of the signaling pathways mediating physiological or pathological processes in the health and disease of humans, animals, plants, fungi, prokaryotes, and protists. The 24th meeting on signal transduction was held from 15 to 17 November 2021 in Weimar, Germany. As usual, keynote presentations by invited scientists introduced the respective workshops, and were followed by speakers chosen from the submitted abstracts. A special workshop focused on "Target Identification and Interaction". Ample time was reserved for the discussion of the presented data during the workshops. Unfortunately, due to restrictions owing to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the poster sessions-and thus intensive scientific discussions at the posters-were not possible. In this report, we provide a concise summary of the various workshops and further aspects of the scientific program.

World Society for Virology first international conference: Tackling global virus epidemics.

This communication summarizes the presentations given at the 1st international conference of the World Society for Virology (WSV) held virtually during 16-18 June 2021, under the theme of tackling global viral epidemics. The purpose of this biennial meeting is to foster international collaborations and address important viral epidemics in different hosts. The first day included two sessions exclusively on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. The other two days included one plenary and three parallel sessions each. Last not least, 16 sessions covered 140 on-demand submitted talks. In total, 270 scientists from 49 countries attended the meeting, including 40 invited keynote speakers.

SABCS 2020: update on triple-negative and metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer.

One year into the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, the 2020 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) was another large congress held in a virtual format. Despite these circumstances, clinically relevant data were presented, and this short review focuses on developments in the fields of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) and metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer. A quality-of-life (QoL) analysis from IMPassion031 showed that adding atezolizumab to neoadjuvant chemotherapy was not associated with a detrimental effect on QoL, while the burden of treatment-induced side effects increased with each cycle of neoadjuvant therapy in both treatment arms. KEYNOTE-355 evaluated the addition of pembrolizumab to chemotherapy as first-line treatment in metastatic TNBC (mTNBC); a significant improvement of progression-free survival (PFS) was reported in the pembrolizumab arm. At the 2020 SABCS, results with respect to different chemotherapy backbones were reported and the benefit of pembrolizumab was maintained irrespective of the type of taxane. Disappointingly, the phase III IPATunity130 study could not confirm a PFS improvement with the AKT inhibitor ipatasertib when added to paclitaxel as first-line treatment in mTNBC. A biomarker analysis from the phase III ASCENT study showed that the antibody-drug conjugate sacituzumab govitecan was superior to chemotherapy by investigator's choice independent of Trop­2 expression and BRCA mutation status. In HER2-positive breast cancer, the PRECIOUS trial suggested a small albeit significant benefit with reinduction of pertuzumab in later treatment lines in patients progressing on prior dual HER2-blockade in the first- or second-line setting. The HER2-specific tyrosine kinase inhibitor tucatinib when added to trastuzumab and capecitabine was shown to improve PFS and overall survival (OS) over trastuzumab and capecitabine alone in pretreated patients in the randomized HER2CLIMB trial; this benefit was apparently independent of hormone-receptor expression. An update from the DESTINY-Breast01 trial reported a median PFS of 19.4 months with trastuzumab deruxtecan in heavily pretreated patients. Finally, an analysis from the PERTAIN trial with > 6 years median follow-up showed excellent OS in patients with luminal B/HER2-positive receiving first-line trastuzumab/pertuzumab in combination with endocrine therapy suggesting that chemotherapy-free treatment is an option in highly selected patients.