St. Anna CCRI hosts 2026 FOSTER Meeting

Our institute hosted this year’s meeting of the FOSTER consortium, which stands for Fight Osteosarcoma Through European Research. FOSTER brings together clinicians, researchers and patient representatives to improve diagnostics and therapeutics for patients with osteosarcoma.

In Simple Terms
– Osteosarcoma is the most common type of bone cancer in adolescents and young adults.
– About 70% of patients with osteosarcoma survive the disease. However, contrary to other pediatric cancers, this number hasn’t improved much in the last few decades.
– FOSTER consortium brings clinicians, researchers and patient representatives together to establish new treatment protocols for osteosarcoma patients across Europe.

The FOSTER consortium was launched in 2022 to advance new treatments against osteosarcoma. Today, it has 350 members from across 19 countries, including clinicians, researchers and patient representatives. These experts are divided into 9 work packages ranging from biology to long-term treatment effects. The FOSTER consortium aims to gain a comprehensive overview of current osteosarcoma biology knowledge and assess the current clinical trial situation in Europe, aiming to identify current gaps and challenges in osteosarcoma treatment.

With 1135 new cases per year across Europe, osteosarcoma represents a significant challenge. Up to a third of patients experience life-threatening relapse. However, no European first line clinical trial has been launched in over 15 years. FOSTER established a new multi-disciplinary platform where clinicians, researchers and patient advocates in Europe can discuss new research avenues and innovative therapeutic approaches that can improve survival and reduce long-term treatment effects.

“The progress in the last years has been fantastic,” says Leo Kager, organizer of this year’s meeting. “We’ve developed a new protocol where we introduce for the first time in Europe a tyrosine inhibitor to complement chemotherapy. In this meeting we’ve discussed how get this new protocol running in various countries.”

“Only when clinicians, experts and researchers meet and work together, we are able to run new clinical trials but also learn more about osteosarcoma biology,” says St. Anna CCRI Scientific Director Sabine Taschner-Mandl.