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ASCO's Pinnacle Presentations: The Path to Plenary Recognition
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Released: May 29, 2024

Expiration: May 28, 2025

John Marshall
John Marshall, MD

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ASCO's Pinnacle Presentations: The Path to Plenary Recognition
[00:05:08] Let's shift gears and talk a little bit about what's going on in the research world. Well, it's May 22nd today. And so all of us are getting ready for the big show in Chicago. 45,000 of your closest friends will be assembled in Chicago. There isn't a hotel room to be found, so don't even try.

[00:05:28] And, we'll present a bunch of data. I mean, a lot of what the meeting is about is other meetings to try and move some balls along, if you will. Let's hope it's not a super spreader event. I think hopefully we're done with that kind of thing. But, you know, there's big data that gets presented. And I've been on the review committee for ASCO for many years over in the past, and I was fascinated at how the abstracts get chosen. You know, the disease teams get a dump of 300, 400 abstracts per working group. They review, they prioritize, and up bubbles the top 50, the top 100, the top 25, top 10, the top 10 of the orals that get presented by colon or non-colon or breast or whatever, and then from all of that, the subcommittees nominate an abstract to be in the plenary session. We now have five abstracts in the plenary session. We don't know what they're going to show yet because they haven't released those abstracts yet. They're all called late break abstracts.

https://meetings.asco.org/2024-asco-annual-meeting/15848?presentation=234899#234899

[00:06:33] So, I took a look, see what we're about to see coming forward at ASCO this year. And of the five, three of them have to do with lung cancer. One small cell clinical trial using IO, one non-small cell using osimertinib. And interestingly, one that's palliative care, whether you should give palliative care remotely or in person, who knows what that's going to show, but it's a positive either way. There is no placebo arm on that. There's nobody not getting palliative care. It's just how it was delivered. How that made it to the plenary session, I don't know. It better be a big impact.

[00:07:08] There's an immunotherapy study for melanoma, adjuvant. Got to be positive, right, got to be practice changing.

[00:07:15] And, then the GI one, my world, was actually two not very good treatments. No new fancy drugs compared head-to-head. FLOT, which is a three-drug regimen for upper GI cancers versus the CROSS regimen, which is chemoradiation for esophageal, and this was looking at adeno. And, how this became the top abstract of the year. I don't know, not a new drug, not anything, not even that common of a cancer. But what we're going to see is a head-to-head of two competing standards, where I'm assuming one of these wins. Now, If the FLOT regimen wins, that's one less place where we're giving standard radiation to people. And, we have to recognize that as chemo and other systemic treatments have gotten better, radiation certainly gets less impactful. But if the other way wins, it means that some of our systemic chemos that we're using in gastric and other cancers may not be optimum treatment either. So, I'm interested to see what happens. I don't really see a standing ovation like we've had in previous years around breast cancer ahead of us, but you never know. Maybe the data will be that transformative that we'll get that standing ovation at ASCO. But I hope to see you, many of you, there, and, of course, on our next episode in a couple of weeks, we'll reflect a bit on what data actually did cause the stir, what bubbles up to be the most impactful out there for us.