Group Meeting Preview: Committee Session Riches

The meeting app and the agenda book are both now available, and the meeting’s session details page includes links to many individual agendas and to call-in information for open sessions.

I’m stretching my group meeting preview over two editions of Front Line this spring because there’s typically so much to write about (with special events, ad hoc symposia, new trial kickoffs, and the like) that I have no space left for another layer of great content presented at each meeting – like keynote talks within individual committees’ open sessions. That’s what I’ll focus on today.

Many of our committee chairs bring in featured speakers for their primary meetings. Obviously, these speakers and topics are selected with a particular committee’s member interests in mind, but interdisciplinarity is a hallmark of SWOG.  There are so many topics that cross disease boundaries – artificial intelligence (AI) driving precision oncology is a big one this spring – that we all have lessons to learn across committees and across modalities.

So here’s a by-no-means-exhaustive list of committee-session presentations that should be  fascinating. Check the meeting app or session details page to learn about what other committees are doing.

• The breast committee’s educational session at this meeting is titled “Emerging Novel Predictors for Treatment Optimization in Breast Cancer” and includes talks on AI-driven prediction in early-stage breast cancer (this one by George Sledge, Jr., MD, a mentor of mine) and on using protein activation mapping to optimize patient selection in trials.
• Continuing the AI theme, our cancer care delivery committee is hosting a presentation titled “AI for Precision Oncology: Validation on Completed Clinical Trials,” by Anant Madabhushi, PhD, who leads the Empathetic AI for Health Institute at Emory University.
• Heather Greenlee, ND, PhD presents a digital engagement committee keynote talk on Cook for Your Life, a project based at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center. Its cookforyourlife.org website provides science-based information on food, cooking, and nutrition for people affected by cancer, but Dr. Greenlee and her colleagues are also using the platform as a tool in researching cancer prevention and survivorship.
• Members who attend the open session of the early therapeutics and rare cancers committee will get to hear updates from our CNS and sarcoma working groups, given, respectively, by Manmeet Ahluwalia, MD, and Lara Davis, MD, who head up those groups.
• This spring’s Livingston Lecture will be presented in the lung committee session. Christian Rolfo, MD, PhD, will give a talk titled “Liquid Biopsy in the Assessment of Minimal Residual Disease.” This annual lecture honors Dr. Robert B. Livingston, who served at different times as chair of both our lung committee and our breast committee – hence the lecture alternates annually between those two committees.
• Our lymphoma committee is hosting a mini-symposium on high risk/transformed indolent lymphomas that will feature three talks (one presenting some early results from SWOG S1608) followed by a panel discussion.
• The open session of our melanoma committee this spring includes a keynote talk “The Sex-Specific Shield: Chromosomes, Hormones, and CD8 T Cell Immunity in Cancer,” given by Zihai Li, MD, PhD, founding director of the Pelotonia Institute for Immuno-Oncology at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. 
• The prevention, screening, and surveillance committee will host the second Frank and Linda Meyskens Annual Endowed Lectureship on Advances in Cancer Prevention: “A Third of a Century Experience in Design, Execution, Analysis, Reporting, and Long-Term Follow-Up of Pivotal Cancer Prevention Trials,” by Ian M. Thompson, Jr., MD. Dr. Thompson was study chair of the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial (PCPT), and a study coordinator on the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT), both landmark studies that continue to generate valuable results. In San Francisco, you can hear some of the lessons learned from these and other prevention studies. 
• The symptom management and survivorship committee’s plenary talk in San Francisco will be by Mark Lewis, MD: “Symptom Management and Survivorship from the Lens of an Oncologist and Cancer Survivor.” Dr. Lewis is, of course, chair of our digital engagement committee. But he’s also someone with hard-won expertise as both an oncologist and a survivor of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (and a Whipple veteran), and his talk promises to provide valuable perspective.

What we have here is an embarrassment of riches (and many with the option of Continuing Medical Education credit). I hope you get a chance to benefit from them!