Welcome address

09:00-09:05 Weng-Onn Lui, John Paoli, Nicole Fischer, Jürgen Becker, Lisa Villabona & Thibault Kervarrec

Session I: Merkel cell polyomavirus and oncogenesis

Chair: Nicole Fischer (Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany) and Ugo Moens (Tromsø, Norway)

09:05-09:35 Nick Salisbury (Seattle, WA, USA)
LT/E2F and ALTO/NF-κB signaling control the switch between MCPyV replication and latency

09:35-10:05 Étienne Coyaud (Lille, France) 
Proximal interactomics approaches to explore MCC oncogenes molecular mechanisms

10:05-10:35 John Charles Rotondo (Genoa, italy)
Epigenetic dysregulation in MCC: a potential therapeutic target

10:35-10:50  Isaac Brownell (Bethesda, MD, USA)
The paranuclear dot as a regulator of extrinsic apoptosis

10:50-11:20 Coffee break   

11:20-11:35  Amanda Macamo (Maastricht, The Netherlands)
Restoring the B-cell identity in MCC

11:35-12:00 Flash poster presentations (3 minutes/presentation)     
Brendan McCann (Glasgow, Scotland, UK), Candice Church (Seattle, WA, USA), Sara Passerini (Rome, Italy), Xiaohao Wang (Stockholm, Sweden), Büke Celikdemir (Würzburg, Germany), Peter Ch’en (Seattle, WA, USA) and Libuše Janská (Stockholm, Sweden).

12:00-12:45 Poster session

12:45-13:45 Lunch         

Session II: Immunobiology and tumor microenvironment

Chairs: Thibault Kervarrec (Tours, France) and John Paoli (Gothenburg, Sweden)

13:45-14:15 Maximilian Haist (Palo Alto, CA, USA)
MCPyV-linked spatial Immunomodulation of the MCC tumor microenvironment and its impact on patient survival

14:15-14:45 Jaehyuk Choi (Dallas, TX, USA)
Immune landscape of MCCs

14:45-15:15 Göran Jönsson (Lund, Sweden)
The role of tertiary lymphoid structures in cancer immunity

15:15-15:45 Coffee break   

15:45-16:00 Tomas Bencomo (Seattle, WA, USA)
Spatial transcriptomics analysis of MCC reveals tumor-intrinsic factors involved in T cell exclusion

16:00-16:15 Paul Harms (Ann Arbor, MI, USA)
The Diagnostic Utility of H3K27Me3 Immunohistochemistry for MCC

16:15-16:30 Haroldo Rodríguez (Seattle, WA, USA)
B cells specific for polyomavirus-derived oncoprotein are predictive of MCC progression