Next Week in San Francisco ...

Events can’t get much more special than the 25th anniversary poster session for our Early Stage Investigators Training Course (ESITC). Six graduates of that course who are now leading SWOG trials will have posters on display late Wednesday through Friday, in the Grand Ballroom Foyer.

Their posters feature the trials they’re now leading but will also give you insight into their experiences making their way within SWOG. And you can ask them about these topics yourself on Friday, from 1 – 2 pm PT, during the pre-plenary reception. At that hour, the authors will be with their posters to field your questions about their trials or about their ESITC experience and navigating the SWOG network. It should be a unique opportunity for other early career investigators, and for the rest of us.

Although cancer tends to be a disease of aging, we often face difficulties enrolling older patients, while adolescents and young adults (AYAs) face their own unique cancer challenges. This spring, we have two symposia focused on how we can increase our enrollment of – and better meet the needs of – these two groups of patients at either end of adulthood.

Our Take Action Symposium, hosted by the recruitment and retention committee, asks how we can better engage adolescents and young adults in our studies. Objectives for the session include improving our understanding of the challenges AYAs face during treatment and survivorship, and of the roadblocks they encounter in attempting to participate in clinical trials.

To bookend this event, we’ll also host a special Geriatric Oncology Symposium – “Enhancing Clinical Trials for Older Adults with Cancer.” This session will feature experts in geriatric oncology offering practical guidance on assessment measures for older patients, study design innovations, leveraging telehealth and palliative care research, and how to lower enrollment barriers for these patients.

Two of our NCORP research base committees will hold dedicated sessions in San Francisco for three new trials – one active and two in development.

Study S2408 opened in February. It’s a collaboration between the palliative care and gastrointestinal committees that tests whether a simple, one-time intervention can reduce the incidence of one of the most serious complications of pancreatectomy – the pancreatic fistula (see today’s Trial of the Week below for more details). 

In addition, two cancer care delivery studies that are expected to open later this year will hold information sessions targeted to NCORP investigators and site staff.

• S2417CD is a pragmatic, randomized study to evaluate an intervention to promote guideline-concordant surveillance among patients who have had surgery for colorectal cancer. It’s expected to open to enrollment this summer.
• S2424CD will test an intervention designed to promote goals-of-care communication with people with advanced cancer. The study team is now recruiting sites to set up an automated screening tool that will reduce site workload on the trial and should accelerate enrollment. They aim for a fall 2025 launch.

For the first time since 2013, we will not convene a separate translational medicine (TM) plenary session, instead hosting a consolidated plenary that includes presentations on both translational medicine and other topics. We’ll hear about work to advance personalized treatment for patients with advanced prostate cancer, and we’ll get a glimpse under the hood of TM-associated work at our Statistics and Data Management Center.

These TM presentations will be complemented with talks on community oncology. We’ve taken numerous steps in recent years to promote the participation of community practice sites and researchers in all stages of our trials, from concept and design through publication. At the plenary, you’ll hear more about what’s being done and what can be done, including information about a new SWOG leadership role that will bring these issue to the forefront.

My chair’s update opening the plenary will address some of the new barriers we’ve faced as a federally funded organization in the year 2025. Several of these challenges are also likely to be discussed in an open forum held by our leadership council on representation first thing Thursday morning.

Our SWOG Clinical Trials Partnerships update forum in San Francisco will be particularly exciting, as CTP’s first clinical trial is now activating – that’s 21CTP.LEUK01 in acute lymphoblastic leukemia, conducted with NO federal support (an idea that has become even more intriguing in recent months). If your site wants to learn more about this trial and about working with SWOG CTP, definitely put this late Thursday session on your schedule. You’ll also hear about some brand new opportunities for working with CTP.

Midday on Friday, our SWOG Latin America Initiative Symposium will address a number of collaborations and opportunities in gastrointestinal cancers, while later that afternoon the annual Nicholas J. Vogelzang, MD, GU Symposium will focus on “Moving into the 21st Century in Urologic Tumors: The Role of AI.” 

Finally, as this is the spring group meeting, we will again offer the Clinical Trials Training Course (CTTC) – although on Thursday this year instead of Wednesday. The CTTC is an oncology research professional’s primary introduction to the fundamentals of working on SWOG and NCI clinical trials. The morning session is offered both face-to-face and virtually, but the afternoon course practicum session is in-person only, with exercises on confirming trial eligibility, determining response to treatment, and completing SWOG data forms.

Yes, we’ve reduced the number of group meeting days overall (and have realized substantial cost savings), but no, we have not reduced the range of exciting opportunities for education, networking, and professional development (many with the option of Continuing Medical Education credits). 

I’m really looking forward to San Francisco. I hope you are too!
 

ASCO Annual Meeting: Abstract Titles Online
ASCO has posted the titles of abstracts accepted for its annual meeting, which opens at the end of May. SWOG trials scored more than 20 abstracts, including five oral presentations. The content of most abstracts won’t be posted until May 22nd, after which I’m sure there will be plenty to discuss in Front Line and other venues.. 

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Trial of the Week

S2408: A Randomized Phase III Blinded Trial of Lanreotide for the Prevention of Postoperative Pancreatic Fistula

Clinical trial S2408, which opened in mid-February, is enrolling patients who are scheduled to have a distal pancreatectomy for a confirmed or suspected malignancy. 

The trial asks whether a single, preoperative dose of lanreotide (a somatostatin analogue) can help prevent post-operative pancreatic fistula, which is a major complication after pancreatic resection.

Although S2408 is a blinded, placebo-controlled study, because of funding limitations, the placebo is not a matching placebo. So the protocol outlines several steps sites must follow to ensure blinding is maintained. This will require some staff to be blinded, some to be unblinded.

• The clinical care team providing patient care before and after surgery will be blinded.
• The research team members who administer the study drug injection will be unblinded.

Separate training slide sets are provided for the blinded and unblinded teams.

The study team advises that sites considering the trial should keep in mind that it is primarily a surgical study and that

• surgeons may or may not be SWOG oncologists and
• a site’s research team may not be based in the surgery department.

S2408 has an enrollment goal of 274 patients. Activated mere weeks ago, the trial is approved for enrollment at only a handful of sites thus far, though dozens more are working to open it.

We have an educational S2408 kickoff event on the schedule for our group meeting in San Francisco, Thursday, May 1, 5:30 – 6:30 pm PT. 

And if you can’t make it to the Bay City in person, you can attend this S2408 kickoff virtually. Register for group meeting and this session to learn more about how to attend via Zoom.

Dr. Jonathan Sham is study chair for S2408, and Drs. Venu Pillarisetty and Robert Krouse are co-chairs. Katherine Guthrie, PhD, and Kathryn Arnold, MS, are study biostatisticians (with a major assist from Amy Darke, MS). Valerie Fraser is S2408 patient advocate, while Dr. Gerald Paul Wright of the Cancer Research Consortium of West Michigan NCORP is the study’s community co-chair.

Learn more from the SWOG S2408 page or the CTSU S2408 page. And when presenting the study to a patient, don’t forget the S2408 patient-friendly summary, available in both online and printable PDF versions.