25 Years of Our Early-Stage Investigator Training Course

And as though that didn’t demonstrate a sufficient commitment, SWOG conducted a second course for a second cadre of young investigators just six months later.

Two workshops per year was the norm for the YITC’s first four years (with a couple of exceptions during competitive-renewal application season). In 2005, the group shifted to just one workshop each year, though that workshop still featured much of a week in Seattle and much of another in San Antonio.

The following year, however, SWOG revamped the program to reduce the time commitment and to simplify travel requirements. Many of the operational components in the curriculum were moved to online courses, with the face-to-face experience condensed into three intensive days in Seattle – essentially the model we use to this day.

March 2001 saw the first activation of a clinical trial that had been developed in a YITC workshop. That was SWOG S0022, a trial in non-small cell lung cancer led by Dr. Raja Mudad, who had worked on the protocol in the inaugural YITC session one year earlier.

More YITC-bred trials followed quickly. In early 2002, the SWOG newsletter noted that three protocols by graduates of the course had been activated in 2001, and that five others were then in development.

Jump forward a quarter of a century, and 27 editions of our flagship course have been convened thus far (in 2023, the course was retitled with the more accurate rubric of Early-Stage Investigator Training Course, or ESITC). The only year since 2000 without such a workshop was 2021, the second year of the COVID pandemic.

To date, more than 50 SWOG clinical trials have come out of the course. The latest is S2408, a palliative care trial activated just last month that had been nurtured through the 2023 ESITC by Dr. Jonathan Sham (our spring group meeting includes an S2408 kickoff session).

The Hope Foundation, sponsor of the YITC/ESITC since its inception, has a project underway to analyze in detail the program’s impact and the success of its graduates. The data collected thus far (on about 80 percent of the course’s 126 graduates) tell us that over those 25 years ESITC alums have authored or co-authored more than 20,000 publications, which in turn have been cited more than 500,000 times.

And those alums have had their work presented at a wide range of major scientific conferences: more than 90 percent, for example, have had work presented at an annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).

They’ve also been extraordinarily successful in garnering funding – both public and private – for their research, with the vast majority having received direct National Cancer Institute (NCI) support. 

A 25th anniversary poster session in San Francisco
To help recognize and celebrate 25 years of profound success, and with the support of Hope, we’re hosting a special ESITC poster session at the spring group meeting in San Francisco.

Six ESITC alums, all of whom are currently leading SWOG trials (or in one case a soon-to-be trial), are contributing posters that will help us learn more about both the presenter’s SWOG-related research and their professional growth and mentorship experiences within the group, including their experience with the ESITC.

Their posters will be on display in the Grand Ballroom Foyer on Thursday and Friday, and the authors will be with their posters to answer your questions and discuss their work on Friday, May 2, from 1 – 2 pm PT, during the reception just before the plenary session.

Here are the six investigators who have graciously agreed to contribute posters:

• Pedro Barata, MD, a graduate of last fall’s ESITC (and a 2023 Coltman Fellow), is study chair of trial-in-development S2419, the BIOFRONT trial in advanced renal cell carcinoma, which will be SWOG’s first study to ask whether modulating the gut microbiome can make a cancer treatment more efficacious.
• Benjamin Maughan, MD, who attended our 2019 ESITC session, is principal investigator of the S2200 PAPMET2 trial, which tests whether adding an immune checkpoint inhibitor to cabozantinib treatment improves outcomes in patients with advanced papillary renal cell carcinoma.
• Jonathan Sham, MD, a member of our 2023 ESITC cohort, is study chair of the S2408 trial activated last month, which is testing whether a single pre-op shot of lanreotide can reduce the risk of one of the most serious post-operative complications of distal pancreatectomy – pancreatic fistula.
• Deborah Stephens, DO, a 2018 ESITC graduate, is study chair of S1925, a randomized phase III study comparing early versus delayed initial therapy in asymptomatic patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. 
• Jing Christine Ye, MD, MSc, another member of our 2019 ESITC cohort, is co-chair of the phase III S2209 trial comparing three induction–maintenance therapy combinations in patients newly diagnosed with myeloma who are not good candidates for transplant.
• David Zhen, MD, a member of the mid-pandemic ESITC cohort in the fall of 2020 (our only entirely virtual workshop) is chair of S2012, a phase II/III trial that tests adding immunotherapy to a first-line treatment regimen in patients with poorly differentiated extrapulmonary small-cell neuroendocrine carcinomas.

We hope the posters, and the chance to interact with their authors on Friday afternoon, will be a chance for others to learn more about the experiences of these six investigators navigating the SWOG network and engaging with their mentors as part of the ESITC experience.

Those who make it happen
This anniversary is a great time to recognize and thank a few key leaders who do much of the heavy lifting to make this course happen each year. 

The course has thrived for a quarter century building on unwavering sponsorship from The Hope Foundation, which also brings in substantial funds from industry partners to meet the program’s needs. Hope provides the ESITC the financial and logistical support without which nothing moves, and Foundation President and CEO Jo Horn has been one of the ESITC’s most ardent champions:

“One of the greatest assets of SWOG is its outstanding network of investigators,” she says, “and one of the single most effective ways Hope fulfills its mission of supporting SWOG is through investing in researchers, specifically supporting the mentorship, guidance, and educational exchange that occurs between early-stage investigators and those with an impressive career of SWOG leadership.” That mentorship, guidance, and educational exchange she speaks of is precisely the heart of the ESITC.

At our Statistics and Data Management Center, Dr. Megan Othus has been providing key support since before I became group chair. Her commitment to the course is second to none, and she recently opened a necessary discussion with the broader SWOG leadership team about how the ESITC might need to evolve in a time when clinical trials are becoming increasingly complex. I’ll keep you updated on that conversation as it unfolds.

Within our Network Operations Center, Dana Sparks has been the ESITC standard bearer since that first YITC workshop 25 years ago. In talking about the course, she highlights what has continued over a quarter century:

“The single common factor, I think, is the passion that our leadership has always maintained for mentoring.  Even as our leadership has changed over time, we have always had stalwarts among our executive officers, statisticians, and committee chairs who show up and participate regularly – and who, like me, really look forward to the experience every year.” 

That human, face-to-face element has been central to the success of ESITC (hence our decision to not hold a course in 2021, because we knew we could not replicate that experience in a purely virtual setting). 

“The early-stage investigators have consistently described the one-on-one mentoring experience and the opportunity to interact with SWOG leadership as the most valuable aspect of the course,” Dana adds, “but I think the faculty also share that feeling.”

The value of the mentoring experience has instilled a fierce commitment to the program among both mentors and mentees. Dr. Parminder Singh, a 2015 graduate of the program, serves as a great example of the depth of that commitment. 

For the second year in a row, Dr. Singh has organized a team to take part in a bike marathon, in collaboration with The Hope Foundation and others, to raise funds specifically to support the Early-Stage Investigator Training Course.

His team’s Tour de Scottsdale efforts last year raised in excess of $12,000, and more than $19,000 has already been pledged for this year’s ride, scheduled for April 12th. All contributions go straight to supporting the ESITC, and there’s still time to make your pledge. 

For SWOG leadership, mentoring our early-career investigators in venues such as the ESITC is a critical part of the group’s mission and an integral part of our team science approach to research. 

It’s also a true source of pride seeing those we’ve mentored achieve success – get a protocol activated, publish results of their research, earn appointments to leadership roles in prestigious organizations.

All of this is key to the future of our work to continue improving the lives of those affected by cancer.

Applications for the fall 2025 ESITC are due by June 3rd.

And don’t miss the ESITC 25th anniversary posters – and the poster session, Friday, May 2, 1 – 2 pm PT – at the SWOG group meeting in San Francisco. Bring your questions!