Personalizing Cancer Care: ASCO's Annual Meeting

Each spring for more than 40 years, The American Society for Clinical Oncology's annual meeting has brought leading physician-researchers together to share results and ideas for improved treatment of human cancers. This year's meeting held May 29-June 2, 2009, in Orlando was organized on the theme of "personalizing cancer care," based on the knowledge that each individual patient's genetic structure plays an important role not only in the development of cancer, but in the response to treatment. "A one-size-fits-all approach to treating cancer is not optimal," said ASCO President, Richard Schilsky, MD, in his opening remarks. "Even cancers of the same diagnosis differ in their molecular and genetic features in ways that may influence a patient's prognosis and response to treatment."

In its sixteenth year, The Breast Cancer Research Foundation has established itself as a leader in scientifically personalized breast cancer care, from being the foremost philanthropy funding studies on genetic susceptibility to breast cancer, along with molecular profiling of breast cancers in their earliest as well as their progressive and metastatic states. In addition to basic molecular and genetic studies, BCRF has helped establish and continues to shape the most effective uses of breast cancer treatments such as Herceptin, tamoxifen, Avastin and the promising new experimental treatment, PARP inhibitors.

From the ASCO meeting's planning to the programming itself, BCRF researchers helped to make this year's meeting a success. BCRF Scientific Advisory Committee Chairman, Clifford Hudis, MD, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; Eduardo Cazap, MD, President of the Latin American and Caribbean Society of Medical Oncology (SLACOM); and George Sledge, MD, of Indiana University at Indianapolis, were represented on ASCO's Board of Directors as Treasurer, Member and President-Elect, respectively. Now Sledge has taken over as President of ASCO and is preparing for 2010's annual meeting. Monica Morrow, MD, based at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, served as Editor of ASCO's Daily News, packed with up-to-the-moment reporting on the events, lectures and scientific data presented throughout the five-day meeting. For 20 years of outstanding service to the organization and the oncology community, Morrow, along with fellow BCRF researcher and member of the Executive Board of Scientific Advisors, Gabriel Hortobagyi, MD, of M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, were recognized with ASCO Statesmen Awards.

Olufunmilayo Olopade, MD, a longtime BCRF researcher based at the University of Chicago, was honored with the ASCO/American Cancer Society Award for her pioneering research in breast cancer genetics. In the lecture that accompanied the award, Olopade spoke of her devotion to preventing breast cancer in the first place by studying the genetics of the disease both in her research and practice in Illinois as well as in Africa, primarily her home country of Nigeria. "I found myself very frustrated with using chemotherapy to manage cancer and finding that the patient still relapses and still dies from cancer," she said of her early career. "I thought that if I committed myself to identifying risk factors and then to determining how to lower individual risk, then that would really be a lifelong pursuit. Instead of waiting for the patients to be diagnosed with cancer, I am increasingly passionate about trying to prevent it," said Olopade.

Also announced at the meeting was the 2009 Gianni Bonadonna Award, to be granted in October to another BCRF researcher, Carlos Arteaga, MD, of Vanderbilt University. The Award will recognize Arteaga's more than two-decade commitment to studying molecular therapeutics for breast cancer. Arteaga and his team are responsible for demonstrating that growth factor pathways in breast cancer can be blocked, providing promising new opportunities for drug development. His research also ambitiously challenges the cancer community to a more a personalized approach to treatment, by tailoring molecular therapeutics to the individual: "How do we identify biomarkers in tumors that will predict the outcome of therapy - positive or negative - so that we can better select patients for clinical trials, and, later, for established standards of care?"

BCRF's Pamela Goodwin, MD, of the University of Toronto, chaired a panel on lifestyle modification in which she and her panelists urged fellow oncologists to review the strongly suggestive observational data on the role of diet and exercise in breast cancer so that more definitive answers can be found. Another BCRF researcher, Antonio Wolff, MD, of Johns Hopkins University, discussed the realities of moving molecular tests for breast and other cancers from the laboratory to the clinical setting during a panel discussion on molecular markers. And BCRF researcher Jose Baselga, MD, of Vall d'Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, Spain, co-chaired an important session on global clinical trials, in which the participants discussed ways to increase international collaboration for trials that would bring potential benefits to more of the world's cancer patients, as well bring the knowledge gained from global studies to appropriate new applications in the United States.