Wrapping Up the Chicago Meeting (and So Much More!)

Changing practice in Hodgkin lymphoma
While it wasn’t directly tied to the Chicago meeting, we certainly celebrated it there (check out this cake) -- primary results of our S1826 trial in Hodgkin lymphoma were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I wrote about initial results of this study when they were presented at the ASCO meeting’s plenary session last year. Today, you can read the NEJM article or our press release (or both).

This NEJM paper includes an additional year of follow-up beyond ASCO – more data, but essentially the same results. With a median follow-up time of 2.1 years, patients age 12 and up with stage 3 or 4 classic Hodgkin lymphoma who received a combination of nivolumab plus AVD chemo as initial therapy had about one-half the risk of progression or death compared to patients who were treated with a standard combination of brentuximab vedotin plus AVD. 

Two-year progression-free survival was 92 percent on the N-AVD arm, 83 percent on the BV-AVD arm. Overall, the investigational treatment also resulted in significantly less toxicity, a difference particularly pronounced in patients older than 60 years of age.

The title of the editorial the journal ran alongside these results sums it up nicely: “Therapy for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma — Can It Get Any Better?”

There’s much to celebrate here, including outstanding collaboration with our colleagues in the Children’s Oncology Group and across the NCTN, including involvement with the Canadian Cancer Trials Group. Congratulations to all who contributed to this trial! Here we truly see the unique impact of public-powered research.

Under the umbrella trials 
Another significant publication released during (but not at) last week’s group meeting was a major revision of the Lung-MAP master protocol. The trial has been expanded to allow sub-study assignment using the results of a patient’s prior next-generation sequencing testing on any of dozens of CLIA-certified platforms. I’ll have more to say about Lung-MAP 3.0 in an upcoming column. 

If you’ve been hearing more this week about the myeloMATCH trial in myeloid malignancies, it’s not only the after-effects of Saturday’s kickoff session in Chicago. The NCI held a press conference on the trial on Tuesday, and we issued a joint press release with the three other NCTN groups leading myeloMATCH sub-studies. The trial is now up and running at more than 150 sites across the U.S. and Canada, the enrollment rate is accelerating rapidly, and more than 300 other sites are working to open the trial.

myeloMATCH may have taken more of the precision medicine spotlight in Chicago, but I was also excited to hear Dr. Katerina Politi report in our translational medicine plenary on the status of the ImmunoMATCH pilot she co-chairs, the S2101 BiCaZO trial. Stage 1 of that study has completed, and the team is preparing for Stage 2. A primary goal of Stage 1 was to determine whether results from biopsy analysis using the iMATCH assays could be returned to sites within 21 days in at least 75 percent of cases. Dr. Politi reported that the 21-days-or-less mark was achieved in a gratifyingly high 91 percent of cases! So, on to Stage 2.

The RFA has dropped
My last piece of news not directly related to our Chicago meeting … the NCI has posted its long-awaited request for applications (RFA) for the next round of core grants for the NCTN groups. Our grant team met in Chicago last Saturday for a mini-retreat to review that RFA and assess where we stand. An enormous amount of work has already been done on the grant application, under the leadership of SWOG co-chairs-elect Drs. Dawn Hershman and Primo Lara. Plenty of work remains, but we are in outstanding shape.

The meeting: Member profiles
And now, Chicago. To encourage members to complete their member profiles, which will provide us useful insights as we craft the next round of grant applications (qv above), we pitted committee against committee in Chicago to see which could generate the highest rate of profile completion among its members.

The winners? In our smaller-committee league (fewer than 70 members), our patient advocates ran away with it, with a completion rate above 75 percent! Our oncology research professionals committee finished second, sneaking just ahead of digital engagement on the last day of the meeting.

Among the larger committees, lymphoma pulled off a narrow win over second-place GU and third-place symptom management and survivorship.

So our patient advocate and lymphoma committees will each enjoy a hospitality spread at their San Francisco sessions next spring. Congratulations to them (NEJM and our member profile face-off, lymphoma), and to our runners up! We appreciate the efforts some of our committee chairs made to rally their members in this cause.

And though this competition may have ended, it’s never too late to complete your member profile.

Community Matters
We engaged in one other contest in Chicago, a “Community Matters” game organized by our community advocates – those patient advocates representing the perspective of a specific community. The game’s premise was that the more we know about the cancer-related challenges faced by individual communities, the better we can provide for members of each community when they turn to us for cancer care.

Dozens of SWOG members completed and submitted game cards, and the two winners – drawn at random from among submissions – were Dr. Lucas Wong and SWOG staff member Anna Moseley. Congratulations to our winners, and thank you to all who took part! To continue your education, here are the correct answers to the Community Matters cards.

A more compact meeting schedule
My final piece of news from the meeting, one I also delivered in my plenary update, is that we will be shrinking our group meeting calendar. 

As grant funding has been pared back, SWOG has worked hard to reduce expenses across the board, and starting next spring, we’ll reduce further by trimming our twice-a-year meeting from four days to three – Thursday through Saturday, with no Wednesday sessions.

We’ll realize considerable savings from this change, and it puts us in line with the practice of most other NCTN groups. I’m confident that, with advance planning, we can make this reduction without a major hit to meeting quality or group productivity.

For purposes of mentoring, networking, collegiality, and more, we think it’s vitally important that SWOG hold face-to-face gatherings, so while we’ll probably continue to host virtual components at future three-day group meetings, we have no plans to move to an all-online meeting format.

Which means I look forward to seeing many of you in San Francisco again next spring – though probably on Thursday rather than Wednesday.
 

Recordings from most Chicago open sessions will be posted to the website soon for SWOG member access. In the meantime, if you registered for the meeting but haven’t yet completed your post-meeting survey, please check your email for the link, and have your say.