Medical oncologists from Australia will be reunited with global colleagues making their first tentative steps back to an in-person major international oncology meeting when the European Society of Medical Oncology annual meeting starts this weekend.
After two years of virtual meetings and remote-based presentations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual ESMO meeting is back to a face-to-face experience, taking place in Paris, from 9 to 13 September 2022.
This year’s ESMO theme is “Understanding the disease to provide better care for cancer patients”, says Professor Fabrice André, Institute Gustave-Roussy, Villejeuf, France, presenting the scientific programme of the ESMO Congress 2022 which he co-chairs with Prof. Charles Swanton, The Francis Crick Institute, London.
Prof André says the in-person meeting will be a chance to catch up on the major developments made in the last few years in areas includingdevelopmental therapeutics, AI-driven tools, liquid biopsy and CAR-T cell therapy in solid tumours.
“We are entering an era in modern oncology in which data on drugs must be integrated with precision medicine, biomarkers, digital tools and artificial intelligence, so it is really important that we as oncologists have discussions on how to optimise the implementation of these advances,” he says.
“The ESMO Congress 2022 will be a great opportunity to interact with key opinion leaders and debate these burning topics in oncology,” adds Professor Swanton.
Prof. Ben Solomon
Australians feature prominently among the presenters and discussants of the 3400 meeting ESMO abstracts including 76 late breaking trials.
From the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne, Professor Ben Solomon will be discussing the future of ALK+ NSCLC and treating KRAS mutant tumours.
Also from the Peter Mac, Professor Sherene Loi will lead a discussion on the microenvironment in early breast cancer focusing on tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes.
And Dr Shahneen Sandhu will be presenting the latest developments in LU-PSMA for prostate cancer treatment, while Dr Sarah Jane Dawson will present on the detection, characterisation and targeting of minimal residual disease (MRD).
Oncologists from the Melanoma Institute Australia will also be at ESMO, discussing trial results including the latest analysis of trials of melanoma patients treated with neo-adjuvant ipilimumab nivolumab.
Prof Georgina Long
Professor Georgina Long is a co-investigator on the EORTC 1325-MG/Keynote-054 trial of pembrolizumab after complete resection of high-risk stage III melanoma, for which further results will be presented during the late-breaking abstracts section of ESMO.
The meeting will also include the latest research findings on COVID-19 and cancer, with an update from the joint analysis of ESMOCoCARE, BSMO, PSMO international databases.
The limbic will be in attendance in-person at ESMO meeting, and we will be reporting on all the major stories from the conference starting in the next issue published on Tuesday 13 September. We will also be tweeting from ESMO 2022 from the limbic Oncology site @thelimbiconc and hashtag #ESMO22