Fall 2024 Group Meeting: A Look Ahead

Our meeting opens next Wednesday with, among other sessions, our annual NCORP Research Base Clinical Trials Workshop. This fall’s installment will be a great opportunity to learn more about the recent restructuring of our NCORP research base committees (cancer care delivery; palliative care; prevention, screening, and surveillance; and symptom management and survivorship), and about the specifics of conducting trials within those committees.

Don’t miss our SWOG Clinical Trials Partnerships (SWOG CTP) update forum Wednesday afternoon! It will include exciting news on one CTP trial expected to launch this fall (21CTP.LEUK01), another that has just executed a long-awaited contract, and a third that’s barreling ahead. I don’t want to steal Dr. Kathy Albain’s thunder, so I’ll let her tell you the good news at that session, which you can also join virtually.

First thing Thursday morning, you can attend a symposium with the enticing title “The Art of Patient Enrollment.” While its stated focus will be trials in genitourinary oncology, its exploration of best practices for achieving robust accrual promises to benefit oncology researchers from all backgrounds.

Also Thursday morning, a symposium on circulating tumor DNA platforms will feature presentations by industry colleagues on half a dozen leading ctDNA platforms, with the presenters available at exhibit tables after the session for one-on-one discussions and questions.

Even later Thursday morning, the SWOG Latin America Initiative (SLAI) Symposium will highlight lymphoma research in Central and South America. This focus is in part a product of the collaboration of Dr. Luis Malpica – recipient of an ASCO Winn Diversity in Clinical Trials Award – with Dr. Alex Herrera and many others. If you want to learn more, I recommend the fabulous coverage of this topic in the summer issue of the SLAI Newsletter.

Chicago’s meeting will include a number of trial pre-kickoffs and kickoffs. These include a Thursday afternoon pre-launch for S2418, the FamilyStrong study. Still in development, this randomized trial will test the effects of a navigator-led distress screening and support intervention for family caregivers. Rather than educating SWOG members about a new study, this pre-launch session is a chance for SWOG members to educate the study team about how to ensure S2418 is feasible at as many NCORP sites as possible. If you’re based at an NCORP, consider attending and contributing.

Friday morning’s sessions will include a kickoff for S2312, which opened last month and asks if testing for aggressive variant prostate cancer (AVPC-MS) can help guide treatment of patients with this neoplastic variant.

We’ll also have kickoffs for two of our flagship studies. myeloMATCH opened just after our spring meeting, and it’s definitely beginning to hit its stride in screening patients and rapidly assigning them to a sub-study (or, if a targeted sub-study is not available, to the Tier Advancement Pathway). This Saturday morning kickoff will answer your questions about activating and conducting the trial’s sub-studies in myeloid malignancies.

myeloMATCH will also be the subject of a deep dive in Thursday’s Jeri and Noboru Oishi Symposium, sponsored by our oncology research professionals committee.

Our landmark Lung-MAP study enters its third generation next week, with the release of a revised screening protocol on Wednesday. Lung-MAP 3.0 will be able to use results from a patient’s prior next-generation sequencing to make a sub-study assignment. The Lung-MAP team has assembled a list of several dozen NGS-based tests that they will accept results from, and they’ll be adding to that list regularly. Attend Friday’s Lung-MAP update meeting to get details on this and much more.

You can also catch an update on our other precision medicine master protocol, ImmunoMATCH, as part of the translational medicine plenary session (Plenary I)  on Thursday.

Speaking of plenaries, don’t miss the general plenary (Plenary II). In addition to my twice-yearly update on what’s going on in your NCTN group, this fall’s plenary will cover artificial intelligence in oncology, important SWOG initiatives for better tracking and conveying operational and scientific data, and new research possibilities opened by health data networks.

If you can’t make it to Chicago, all of the sessions I’ve mentioned above can also be attended virtually. Zoom links and agendas are on the session details page on the group meeting website and, of course, in the fall meeting mobile app.

In a late addition to the schedule, the DEI Leadership Council will devote the last part (4:25 – 4:45 pm CT) of its Thursday session to an open forum, so they can hear concerns and ideas directly from SWOG members.

Finally, our fall group meeting will include plenty of encouragement to complete your SWOG member profile. We’ll try to stoke your competitive spirit – and that of your committees’ leaders. As I wrote previously, we’ll display a leaderboard that ranks our research and research support committees by profile completion rate, tracking larger and smaller committees in two separate categories. We’ll update the rankings each night, and we’ll make a final tally first thing Monday morning after the meeting ends.

The winners will enjoy a hospitality spread at their committee session in San Francisco next spring, but the real prize will be a license to gloat.

I wish you safe travels! And, I’m really looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible in person next week in Chicago.