CONGRESS NEWS

Highlights of the 15^th BSMO-Bordet symposium – The Integration of Molecular Biology Advances into Oncology Clinical practice

SUMMARY

In light of the ongoing global pandemic, the 15^th BSMO-Bordet symposium meeting went virtual in 2021. This did not detract from the engaging lineup of presentations, emphasising treatment breakthroughs in various cancers. In addition to this, several projects with a local impact on the Belgian oncology landscape were presented.

(BELG J MED ONCOL 2022;16(2):88–96)

Highlights of the Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium 2021

SUMMARY

The annual Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium was held from 15 till 17 January 2021 in a virtual format. During this meeting, evolving immunotherapy options were shown in the upper digestive tractus, already presented at ESMO 2020. Besides immunotherapy, also the total neoadjuvant treatment approach (TNT) in rectal cancer reached sufficient attention, changing our current standard of practice in 2021. Targeted therapies for different gastrointestinal (GI) tumour locations showed promising results, paving the way for more personalised medicine.

In this report, the most important headlines will be discussed, with comments on the clinical relevance of the different studies.

(BELG J MED ONCOL 2021;15(6):331-9)

Highlights in gynaecological cancer

“The United States is a long way from achieving clinical equity among its people” said Joe Elia, editor of NEJM Group in the introduction of the eBook on Racial Disparities in Clinical Medicine which was distributed among all ASCO members in June 2021. It is not without reason that this eBook is coming out now. In the President’s Address, Lori J Pierce mentioned how segregation impacts on health care. “Today”, she said, “ensuring equity of care – that is our good fight, this is the foundation of ASCO”. It was interesting to notice that this topic also got attention in the Gynaecological Cancer track of the meeting. Overall, ASCO 2021 featured 14 presentations on cervical cancer, 32 on uterine cancer and 60 on ovarian cancer. The most important messages of these different presentations will be discussed in this article.

(BELG J MED ONCOL 2021;15(5):197-205)

Highlights in breast cancer

ASCO 2021 featured one crucial, practice-changing trial in early breast cancer: the OlympiA trial showed that one year of adjuvant olaparib improves invasive disease-free survival by 8.8% compared to placebo, when administered to high risk early breast patients (triple negative or hormone sensitive and HER2 negative) with a germline BRCA1 or 2 mutation. Furthermore, ECOG-ACRIN EA1131 failed to show improved outcome in triple negative breast cancer treated without pathological complete response after neoadjuvant chemo-therapy with platinum based chemotherapy compared to the current standard capecitabine. GeparNUEVO for the first time showed long term outcome with anti-PD(L)1 therapy administered with neoadjuvant chemotherapy in triple negative breast cancer. In the advanced setting, interesting overall survival updates of the PALOMA-3 and MONALEESA-3 studies were presented. Furthermore, the SYsucc-002 trial demonstrated that trastuzumab plus endocrine therapy was non-inferior to and had fewer toxicities compared with trastuzumab plus chemotherapy in patients with HR+/HER2- metastatic breast cancer. In addition, this article will touch upon several other studies that are notable.

(BELG J MED ONCOL 2021;15(5):208-17)

Highlights in immunotherapy

Over the last decade immunotherapy has become an integral part of the oncogenic treatment arsenal. Meanwhile, the field of immune-oncology continues to evolve, which was amply illustrated by the large number of studies evaluating innovative immunotherapies presented at ASCO 2021.

(BELG J MED ONCOL 2021;15(5):218-23)

Highlights in head and neck cancer

The ASCO Annual Meeting was held from 4 till 8 June 2021 in a virtual format. During this meeting, immunotherapy arrived in first-line recurrent/metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma, adjuvant capecitabine enters prudently the treatment algorithm of nasopharyngeal cancer, results of de-escalation studies in HPV-positive oropharyngeal cancer are promising and forwarding to phase III studies, cabozantinib shows impressive results in later-line radioiodine-refractory differentiated thyroid cancer, and immunotherapy tries to find a place in recurrent/metastatic salivary gland tumours, a tumour type without a uniform standard of care anno 2021. In this report, the most important headlines will be discussed, with comments on the clinical relevance of the different studies.

(BELG J MED ONCOL 2021;15(5):226-33)

Highlights in respiratory oncology

At ASCO 2021 much of the attention in the field of lung cancer went to early-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) discussing both (neo)adjuvant strategies and local treatment modalities. In metastatic NSCLC, we would like to highlight some recent (chemo)immunotherapeutic advances in the treatment of non-oncogene addicted tumours as well as promising strategies to overcome osimertinib resistance, targeting of KRAS G12C mutated tumours and updated results for EGFR exon 20, HER2 exon 20, MET and RET targeting. As a final abstract, the results of the randomised phase III CALGB 30610/RTOG 0538 trial evaluating high-dose thoracic radiotherapy in small cell lung cancer will be summarised. We would like to acknowledge Prof. Veerle Surmont (University Hospital Ghent) for her help in selecting the abstracts discussed in this overview.